RETREVR

i do think it needs to be pointed out that a lot of us home cooks benefit from extremely low expectations on the part of our diners--something that is not shared by someone going to a 3-star restaurant. i do wonder why people seem to be so hesitant to credit the talent aspect of this discussion. it's kind of funny, really. if we were a bunch of playground basketball players, i don't think we'd hesitate to say that kobe bryant can do things that we can't. if we were living room cellists, we wouldn't be afraid to admit that rostropovich was capable of more than we were. good cooks can be made, but i'm afraid truly great chefs--like great writers, great musicians, great athletes--are born. and then to be able to realize their ability, they must work, work, work. combine innate talent, years of practice and an absolutely unshakeable drive and seriousness of purpose--that's what it takes. to think that we should be able to equal that in our spare time is ludicrous. ← I think it's misleading to try and compare cooking to basketball or music. Although there are certainly artistic elements in the menu planning, the pacing and the presentation, at it's core, Cooking is a craft, not an art. The meat is either perfectly medium rare or it isn't, the oil is either exactly 375 degrees or it isn't, theres either exactly enough salt or there isn't. The reason Keller and the like are considered to be 4 star restaurants is not because they have any super-ordinary skill in the technical aspects of cooking. ← Craft is not a bad word in my book. Howver, if you have never had anything that trancends craft and becomes art....you realy haven't been eating right. By the way. No...there is no such thing as perfect medium rare.

I know I won't get much sympathy from the PCs because I am primarily a hot sider. But I did bake 3 items today. (But I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night). My chef is absent all the time and has come back from 2 weeks off. We had a complaint about a sauce I made from from lamb broth. The customer wanted a demi and had expressed that to the owner when she booked. I told the owner that it is pretty darn hard to make demi without veal bones (which I have been asking for since week one). She said that would not be a problem (finaly). In the past the chef had sent me to a gig with a green peppercorn sauce made from canned beaf broth and cornstarch. It sucked. I could make a better sauce out of pan drippings and Mountain Dew. So I finally get the bones in. I send the chef on a gig with a good veal stock this weekend for her tenderloin sauce. It went well. A quality sauce really makes a difference. Fast foreward to today. The owner calls to tell me about small menu change for tommorow. The banquet was to have flank steak. The hostes (same one that bitched previously about not getting demi...ironically) wanted to know why the dinner was so expensive. The owner tells her, "well, flank steak is as expensive a tenderloin". Can you guess what came next? The hostes says, "well I want tenderloin then". Owner responds, "no problem" No big deal, just a little extra work for me. The expra expense is not my problem. The owner calls and asks how I want to sauce it. I tell her off the top of my head that maybe a shitake madeira brown sauce. She tells me "no, I want something sophisticated like green peppercorn sauce". For those who don't know(as the owner does not), these are both brown sauces. I am pretty sure that If Iasked her what a mother sauce was she would reply "Ketchup!" No big deal...I will talk it over with the chef. The chef comes in. She tells me that it is a waste to be making our own veal stock because we can make all our sauces just as well out of canned beef broth. Super. Talk about trying to make whipped cream out of skim milk. I guess Escoffier and the chefs since just didn't know how to make a nice demi out of rat piss. She wants to make a blue cheese sauce for the tenderloin anyway. Fast foreward to tommorow. The chef will tell the owner who will tell the hostess that we are having a blue cheese sauce. The chef will be nowhere to be found tomorrow. I will wait until 5:00PM for either the the chef or a quality cheese to show up. Niether will happen, then I will have to find a way to make a sauce out of rat piss and velvetta. At least I will get a laugh out watching the other staff members trying to make creme carmel out of condensed milk and brown sugar. I don't get to write the munu and I don't get to learn anything. I have the best of both worlds.

I had a bad night a few weeks ago. A few days later I looked down at a little burn I had on my hand. I decided that if that can heal in a week, I can put a bad night behind me in a week. Your problems seem to be adding up day after day. That is tough because little stuff can set you off. The hot side is rock and roll. You can always fix something in the middle or end of preparation. You can always fine tune a sauce. Pastry is different. You have to understand the ingredients and manipulate them correctly from the begining. It is pretty hard to fix a loaf of bread two hours into the process. It sounds like what you are dealing with is just ignorance. If the hot side guys could work a shift once in a while as the towel boy for the PC they would have more respect for what your job entails. I was the back up baker in a small place. I had a lot more respect for the baker after the first few times he went on vacation. I could also watch his back when he had stuff in the oven or when he got in the weeds. It may be helpfull for you to write down some issues. However, I would not sit down with the chef with a list of issues such as the egg whites and wipping cream examples. You will come across as petty. Vent here with those issues....then let them go. I have a manager that is dangerous with knives. She walks around the kitchen swinging them around. A few days ago I had to tell her three times to please pay attention. She was going around corners holding them out streched. Pointing over her shoulder with them. Trying to pull buss tubs off the cooler with a chefs knife in her hand. Finally she picked up my chefs knife and cut her sandwich on a stainless steel table and then tossed the knife down on the table. I lost it. We had a discussion the next day. Not and hour later, she has a chefs knife stuffed in a kitchenaid. Sometimes talking does nothing. Sometimes guerilla (sp) tactics are helpfull. They can help a cook understand that you can make his life easier. IF not they can make you feel better, or keep your mind from obsessing about the things that piss you off. Example: I was using a space one morning for baking. It is not a dedicated bakers bench, but the stand mixer is there and it is out of the way of everyone else. I had flour out and it was obvious that this was my space for the time being. A prep person came over and put a bowl of something down. I ask her to please not use my space. I come back and there is a tub of raw chicken. I tell her not to use my space. An hour later I come back and there is a tub of alfredo. Lets just say that I did not have to say anything this time. She was at my mercy if she ever wanted to see fredo again.

Once in a while I even move a second finger up to join my index finger. Big chefs knives (11") are often blade heavy. This is ok if you keep the tip on the board(dicing carrots). Once in a while I will have the big knife in my hand and have to make a few delicate cuts. This is when I move my second finger foreward. All this does is move my hand foreward in order to ballance the blade. My 8" Shun is ballanced. If I were to move my hand back to the handle it would make this knife(and virtually all chefs knifes) blade heavy. Again...most other styles of knives are to be held by the handle. Paring knives end up being held in many different ways.

I bought one at the thrift store for $2.95. Works fine. I made a grapefruit sorbet to be served tonight. It was killer. The ruby reds rock right now. I Think it is a Rival. I made 2 quarts and had plenty additional capacity (might hold 4 quarts). The expensive part is that I have to build a barn for the dammed thing to cut the noise down. When my machine breaks I will go buy another. It sits next to my $5 Atlas pasta roller and my $5 Maviel heavy roaster.

I'm not sure what it really takes to get 4 stars by any standard(Michelin/NYT...). But it seems to me most posters seem to look at a 4 star restaurant as a restaurant you buy a 4star meal at. And after having that 4 star meal, you could just go search out the ingredients and replicate the meal at home. Fair enough. This is posible given enough skill, equiptment, and ingredients. No problem. This looks at the meal as a static point in time. You have to understand the process. The menu might include pairings that came about just because there happen to be certain products available at time of menu writing. Fine chefs are constantly playing with ingredients, techniques, pairings that are new to them. Sure some are just doing old classics, but most of the high dollar dining is being spent on very creative stuff. Menu writing is huge Here's an idea. Take the best 4star restaurant in NY. Open a clone right next door. Steal last nights menu from them and prepare it the next day. Would you have two 4star restaurants? I don't think so. Not to mention the skill of some of the pastery chefs out there. Good luck even replicating their products. The creative process goes on every day. Consistency is judged by diners with very high expectations. Judged with every bite, every course, every day. Not just once in a while. Sure, someone can pick up a cookbook a replicate a dish or a meal. Just understand that that wonderfull dish was probably created in the head of a master over a year ago. That master has to conceive these dishes day in and day out and produce them for the fist time and have them live up to very high expectations. I think to pose the original question exposes some degree of misunderstanding. There are a lot of people that can produce a spectacular meals. To produce them consistently over time while being inventive is a whole different matter. Having said all this. The toughest competition a chef will ever have is from home cooks. Go out to Kansas and try to impress someone that has home cooked meals all week long. It is harder to impress them than it is to impress someone that has been eating at average restaurants all week. The real question should be: "Is it possible to cook a home cooked meal in a restaurant?"

Sorry maybe this is a newbie question, but if you don't hold a chef's knife by the handle, how do you hold it? ← For most tasks I hold a chefs knife by pinching the heel of the blade and letting the handle run through my palm. I only realy hold it by the handle for sharpening and washing. The more ergonomic bumps and shapes a handle has...the less practical it becomes.....for me at least. Other knives (boning, cimetar, slicer) are held by the handle. Again...anything beyond a basic shape tends to make the handle less comfortable....for me anyway. It is my understanding that Shun is layered steel, not a faux finish.

The gyutou is a western styled knife and looks like a chefs knife. One difference is that most gyutos are sharpened at different angles on each side of the blade. Thus one generaly has to special order a left handed knife. There are many steels used. From very hard high carbon(not stainless) to very hard alloys with cobalt. Many use a super hard steel sandwiched betwene two layers or more softer stainless steel. This gives you a super hard edge without the blade being brittle. Most use steel harder than typical Solingen steel. Many of the gyutous have a rockwell of around 60 as German stainless steel is generaly in the low and mid 50s. I am not a metalurgist. Gyutous usualy have thinner lighter blades. The bolster is not needed to ballance the knife. Not having a full bolster makes it possible to sharpen the entire length of the blade. The form is realy not revolutionary. The quality of the steel is the real attraction, even in the $100 and under range. The craftsmanship becomes the attraction in the more expensive knives.

Beer cheese... I used to make a Stilton Ale soup at a brewery. It was so long ago that I forget how I made it. I will have to check my notes. It was very rich and stinky. This is off subject, but....we would also melt stilton on top of a grilled ribeye. Call the cardiologist.

http://www.jbprince.com/index.asp?PageActi...ROD&ProdID=1490 The place I used to work had one of these. It was the size of a jack-hammer. Ten gallons of creme of asperagras soup in seconds. The sous had it get away from him once and dumped a pot of soup into an ice bath at about ten minutes till the lunch bell. You could use this thing to put holes in drywall.

I am not an experienced baker, but I did get a little extra rise out of my bannana bread today. I can't help you with making them more even though. In the past I had used a hand-held blender. Today I used the kitchenaid. I cream my eggs and sugar. I beat in veg oil. Add bannana Fold in dry ingredients. Now. In the past I did not beat my eggs and sugar as much. With the stand mixer, I walked away to grab something. I also think that in the past I just added the dry ingredients and did not do a carefull folding. This is what I am thinking: The extra beating of the eggs in the first stage incorporated more air into the batter. The care I took to fold the dry ingredients helped keep the air in the batter. My loaves had better rise than ever. Again. I know a lot about cooking but I am not a pro baker.

This is my workhorse gyuto right now: http://www.japanese-knife.com/Merchant2/me...gory_Code=HFU-F Takes and holds a nice assymetrical edge. I sanded down the handle a little and rounded off the spine and heal for fit. It is blade heavy but that is OK for the prep tasks that require the big knife. Great knife for the money. It claims to be swedish carbon steel on the inside but I have not seen any tarnish. I use a 8" Shun Chefs knife while I am at the stove and for finer work. It is not really a gyuto, but a Japanese made western style chefs knife. One of these might be my next: http://www.japanese-knife.com/Merchant2/me...ory_Code=HMI-SW Carbon can turn off clients when you are cooking in their homes. I want one anyway. VG-10 is awsome but carbon has soul.

I cook it in a cast iron skillet unless I am nekid....Then I cook it in the oven. If cooking in the oven, wear your apron backwards so you don't scare anyone when you bend over to pull the bacon out of the oven. Nothing wrong with wrapping a filet. That cut has no flavor to begin with. There are more subtle fats that can be used for larding fine cuts. Jalepeno wrapped in dove wrapped in bacon and grilled is pretty dammed good. Fresh caught trout fried in bacon fat with cornmeal is fairly good also. I had the contract for our local octoberfest this year. Can you say potato salad with bacon dressing? Do you have any idea how much bacon you have to cook off to get enough fat to make dressing for 2000 people? A am pretty much convinced that there will not be peace in the middle east untill the people embrace pork...bacon in particular.

Sharpening is a problem eventualy. The kullens are very close to the edge. A chefs knife gets used a lot and therefore sharpened a lot. I don't like the fact that the edge is soon to be interacting with the kullens after not so many sharpenings. THe boltser will prevent you from sharpening the heel of the blade also. If you want a german knife, consider the cordon blue or the messermiester which have the half bolster. Talk about trends. I have seen these kullens on all sorts of knives lately. The high dollar serraded chefs knife is also a new trick. I guess they are targeted to people smart enough to buy a quality knife but not smart enough to sharpen one. The kullens offer very minimal advantages on a chef knife and huge disadvantages. Two years from now the guy at the Wusthof dealership will be selling you the new model because the edge is worn into the kullens. I will be enjoying my just broken-in flat blade. The Glestains are good knives but have a pretty hefty price as well. I could find quite a few knives I would rather have for less money. You will also notice that the kullens are set much farther away from the edge on the Glestain. I would consider a slicer with the kullens for a few reasons. They offer a greater advantage in very thinly sliced roast and raw fish. The slicer is not used nearly as much and rarely is it in contact with the cutting board. Thus it does not need to be sharpened as often. Thus it wears down very slowly. Lastly....I don't have a deep attatchment to my slicers. I can just buy a new one. The chefs knife is my closest confidant and I keep them forever.

First of all The 8" chef knife is not blade heavy. I haven't held the 10", but I can tell you that the 8" is ballanced. I have used Wusthofs in a pro kitchen for about 15 years. I bought the shun 8" chef knife and haven't used my wusthof since. The old german knives have a place in my heart but not in my kit. Shun uses a cobalt alloy for the interior layer of the knife. This is much harder than a typical german solingen steel. It is also more brittle, thus the layers of softer steel on the exterior. The blade is lighter and thiner than a german knife. The hardness allows you to put a more acute bevel on the edge thean a german knife could hold. The shun also lacks the full bolster. This allows you to sharpen the entire blade.The handle is fine. You should not be holding a chefs knife by the handle anyway. The shun line is a western patern with a quasi-japanese handle. Korin sells gyutos that are quasi-western patterns with western handles but have assymetrical bevels on the blades. Many of the gyutos use extremly hard steel or layers of steel. The gyutos make my Wusthofs look like something from Hasbro. If you want to educate yourself look at some of the reviews over at http://www.knifeforums.com/ubbthreads/post...=&Board=Kitchen

Iron Chef had a turkey battle the other night. Iron Chef Japanese sliced truffles and slid them under the skin of the bird before cooking. Sounded pretty good to me.

I might add that I have had ample opportunity to to take these birds. I had two fly over that I could have bagged with a butterfly net. I let them fly because I wasn't prepared to take them home and eat them. There are refuges for these birds in Colorado also.

Don't shoot those things! I like watching them come through my state when they migrate! Edit to remove invective ← Quite a leap in logic that someone shooting a legal gamebird is going to deprive you of the beauty of the sandhill migration.

It is very important to identify the bird. More so than in general waterfowling. The last thing you want to do is hit a wooping crane. Waterfowlers make huge contributions every year to fund habitat, environmental legislation, and research. I do not know a lot about the cranes. I do know that snowgeese are over-running tundra habitat that is crucial to the nesting success of birds that have dwidling populations. The goose is beautiflul, and shooting twenty of them may seem grizly to some. However, it serves a purpose. There are arguments as to how effective humans can be when we try to find an artificial equilibrium in nature. Save that for another forum. My point is that hunting quotas are set without much consideration for how pretty the bird is and how well it eats.

I usually don't bother plucking. Basically skin the bird. I make two cuts with shears on either side of the backbone from the arse to the neck and pull the whole peice out. Pull the inards out. An yes the retriever usually gets a treat. Remember to leave one foot atatched to confirm sex if you will be transporting the bird. The bird is really nothing but a wild chinese chicken. You can section it out as you see fit. If you plan on plucking them on a regular basis you can get a tool to atach to your drill. This is a drum with rubber fingers. Pretty sure kitchenaid doesn't make this attatchment.

The best meal I have ever had was a dominos pepperoni pizza in the duluth airport after spending three weeks in the boundry waters with nothing good to eat. Or Thanksgiving five years ago. My dog and I celebrated alone. She got her first pheasant that day. I cooked it up with some home-made Kansas crabapple jelly. Or Svilars in Hudson Wyoming after a week in the bush. Worth the trip. Or The powerbar and gatoraid I ate after spending 25 minutes neck deep in ice water. Or The meal I had in a little french restaurant here in town. I ordered a chicken crepe and the chef loaded my plate with quail and sweatbreads instead. Context plays a big role in how good the meal is. Great meals are not served in a vacume.

Fancy schmancy dining always looks out of place on the holiday table. The holidays are for friends and family. Not for impressing. It would be more apropriate to try to blow someones doors of on new years.

Seems like it doesn't fit your expectations. Now that you know what to expect, you may avoid it all together, or try it for a late lunch. For someone that wants a decent, fairly quick lunch but doesn't want McDonalds, it seems like a good fit. When I am on the go I will avoid sit-down full service places because I don't want the hassle. Twenty dollars won't buy lunch for two at decent sitdown restaurant, and that is before tip. Furthermore, the lunch waitsfaff at a cheap sit-down joint is usually so inept that you would do better to serve yourself. Diners can be the exception. Now, maybe they should have an expeditor to sort out the orders. Or maybe they should have food runners instead of full service wait staff. There is a trendy pizza joint in town that has runners only. It works, but we were very confused the first time we ate there. We go in and sit down. We had no idea that you had to order at the end of the bar. No big deal. Someone needed to tell us how it worked. The problem was nobody said anything. After sitting there for ten minutes without anybody making contact, we left. I understand your frustration. Side note: Sometimes we get bread from panera for caterings when we are low on stock, or don't have time to bake. We ordered ten bagetts from them to be picked up the following morning. At the time of pick-up, they gave us no less than fifty loaves and only charged us for ten. Our employee informed them of their mistake. They replied that everything was in order. After loading up, our employee went back in and tried again to explain that they had charged for ten and gave us fifty. The manager insisted that everything was in order. This was not day-old. Go figure.

I make them for banquets. I cheat and use a half sheet that I preheat, pour in about 24 eggs, let set up and then add my flavors. Last one was wild mushroom, spinach, and fresh mozarella. As far as cream goes. The notion is always that cream will make nice fluffy creamy eggs. I use a bit of cream because I was told to. But, I don't buy it. Try making two batches of scrambled eggs. One with water and one with cream. I think the water makes a better product. Eggs are rich enough without cream, and the water gives great texture.

Depends on how you look at it. Used to be that the only chains were like taco bell and mcdonalds. In that light, they are an incredible improvement. If you compare it to an artisnal bakery, of course you will be disapointed. Call Ralph Nader. Or feel free to compete if you can do better.