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johnder

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    Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine" (Part 2)

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Mental note, when making baked beans, don't add any Calcium Chloride to it. It makes the beans seem uncooked even though they are soft inside. I read in the book that adding 1g of CaCl2 per 100g of water will firm up beans and prevent them from splitting, so I decided to play around with it.

    It did indeed make a firm bean, not the texture you want in baked beans, but I can see it working in other applications.

    Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine" (Part 2)

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Has anyone tried making Pommes Pont-Neuf on 3-323? I find the scalings as is do not have enough water to even cover the potatoes. I made the Russet potatoes scaling at 67% instead of 100% and that seemed much butter. Second issue is that it says to boil them for 20 minutes and it notes that they should be nearly falling apart. After 12 minutes my potatoes are completely falling apart and almost impossible to remove from the pot in whole pieces with many of them breaking apart into nothing... I chucked my first batch and am now going to try boiling for about 9 or 10 minutes.

    rg

    I haven't but that was next on my list.

    The only correction I see in their errata list is:

    On pages 3·323 and 6·160, the recipe for Pommes PontNeuf should call for 0.75 g of baking soda with a scaling

    of 0.15%.

    Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine" (Part 2)

    in Cooking

    Posted

    The "mold" is what a confectioner would call "caramel bars" or what a cheapskate would call "a couple sticks of aluminum taped together and set on a Silpat." It's what I use for layered dipped chocolates: each bar is 12" long and 1/4" square cross section, hollow. I make the shape I want and then tape them together so they don't slide around. Real "caramel bars" are heavier and will stay in place on their own.

    Thanks for the reply. I can't believe how expensive little bars of aluminum are. After seeing the prices I went to Lowes and bought a 1" x 48" square aluminum tube and cut it down to four 11.5" pieces. Now I have caramel bars and they only cost me $20. Sure they might be hollow, but for the money I can't complain.

    I did the sane thing a few months ago. However I filled the tubes with sand and filled the ends with epoxy to give the bars some more weight. Works pretty well.

    Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine" (Part 2)

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Not sure if I am missing it or something, but on 2-425 in the puree table for onion puree it references page 2-426, but that only have two recipes on it, broccoli and hazelnut puree and creamed watercress. Not sure if it is supposed to reference something else or not.

    Kitchen Lingo

    in Restaurant Life

    Posted

    The former. Usually it is when you get a slew of orders, and it is just a clarification/update;

    e.g. (I will use bar speak :-) ) if a table orders a 2 manhattans and another table orders 1 manhattan, it would be I need 3 manhattans all day.

    "Modernist Cuisine" by Myhrvold, Young & Bilet (Part 3)

    in Cookbooks & References

    Posted

    Somewhat odd article about the book, again from someone who hasn't seen the book except for other press clippings.

    What is odd is she claims she prefers "good old fashioned kitchen wisdom" and "Bringing science and systematic thinking to bear can ruin the fun."

    While it by no means is a negative article about the book, it is interesting because to me it seems all over the place, especially in this passage:

    I have good old-fashioned kitchen wisdom to thank for knowing to rest gnocchi dough before rolling it, never to crowd a sauté pan, and always to use ice-cold butter for pie crusts. I'm sure some of my techniques and beliefs could be disproven with an appeal to the scientific method, but you know what? I'm okay with that. I'm willing to be a slightly less good cook in return for not having my brain hurt during this particular part of my day

    She mentions 3 actions she knows that have a better result that if she did it another way, but doesn't seem to care why or how it is, or even it there is a better way. All for the purpose of it being romantic.

    Anyway, I will give her props for she did manage to get Rocky and Snooki mentioned in the same article

    Modernist Ingredient Kits

    in Kitchen Consumer

    Posted

    propylene glycol alginate have about 220g in my cupboard unopened, never known how to use it in comparison with Sodium Alginate, what's the difference, does it go off?

    The applications I've noticed it in are more related to emulsification/stabilization (e.g. the "bulletproof beurre blanc"). From johnder's link it looks like the protanal ester version would be best for those applications.

    "bulletproof beurre blanc" buy a thermomix LOL

    I think the idea is you can refrigerate it, freeze it, etc. then just heat it back up and you are ready to go (i.e. still have a nice emulsion).

    It looks similar to the reheatable brown butter hollandaise in the Ideas in food book. (Which I made the other day, worked really well. However, I would leave the lime pickle out of it next time, it kind of overtook the flavors a bit)

    Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine" (Part 1)

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by johnder (log)

    I'm making this this week as well: are you just using normal carrot juice, or omitting it entirely?

    I just used straight carrot juice. I also just used straight unsalted plurga butter as I couldn't make the carrot butter either.

    I was a bit worried about the liquid level in the pressure cooker but a ridiculous amount of liquid came out from the carrots. You start with 80gr of butter. I weighed the liquid after pressure cooking and I had almost 140gr of liquid post 50 minute cooking.

    Carrots before cooking:

    car_soup1.gif></a></p><p>Carrots after cooking:</p><p><a href=/monthly_04_2011/post-22527-0-12219400-1302372608.gif' class='ipsAttachLink ipsAttachLink_image'>car_soup2.gif></a></p><p>The recipe calls for running the puree of carrots (post juice adding) through a strainer, but after running it through the vita-prep it was like silk. I ran it through anyway and 99.9% of it passed through. </p><p>After adding the juice and more butter, the final soup:</p><p><a href=/monthly_04_2011/post-22527-0-17554200-1302372613.gif' class='ipsAttachLink ipsAttachLink_image'>car_soup3.gif></a></p><p>A few notes: The aroma of the carrots cooking in the PC are pretty amazing. It is this elusive sweet smell with hints of caramel. Very pleasant. I think depending on the sweetness of your carrots the 7.5 gr of salt may be too high. This are early spring carrots and while not "young" I would say they are youngish carrots and moderately sweet. I found the carrots when I tasted them coming out of the PC to be salty, almost to the point where you can

    Cooking with "Modernist Cuisine" (Part 1)

    in Cooking

    Posted

    I have a question regarding the pressure cooked carrot soup. I don't have the books yet (2 more weeks hopefully!) but I seem to recall from the videos talking about this recipe that no water is added to the carrots inside the pressure cooker. I'm pretty sure that most pressure cookers require you to fill them to a certain level with a liquid.

    Could you clarify on how the pressure cooked carrots are made? Thanks!

    I am actually making this soup now. Unfortunately my centrifuge is out at the repair shop :biggrin: so I will not be centrifuging the juice needed for the second part of the recipe.

    I figured I would try the recipe without the CF juice first and then pay a visit to Dave Arnold at the FCI with my 645 gr of juice and have him spin it for me and try it again to see the difference.

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