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Patrick S

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Everything posted by Patrick S

  1. I finally got around to using my new hemisphere molds. This is a frozen mousse bombe with a flourless chocolate cake base, a honey/Manjari glaze, and some cocoa macarons for garnish. The only thing I wasnt happy with was that the glaze turned dull as soon as it went on the mousse dome . . . which I guess is unavoidable since the mousse was frozen.
  2. No, basically those brownies are (basically) CI's turtle brownies minus the pecans. The caramel recipe is as follows: 1/4 cup heavy cream plus 2 additional tablespoons 1/4 teaspoon table salt 1/4 cup water 2 tablespoons light corn syrup 1 1/4 cups sugar (8 3/4 ounces) 2 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Combine the cream and salt. Set aside. Combine the water, corn syrup and sugar in a medium saucepan. Cover for a few minutes so that they steam will wash away any stray sugar grains on the side of hte pan. Uncover and cook over medium-high heat until the sugar is caramelized, about 360F. Remove from heat, and carefully stir in the cream. You might want to wear an oven mit so you're sure not to get any steam burns. I find that if you stir the cream in slowly rather than dumping it all in at once, the caramel doesn't sieze up so much and you don't have to spend time remelting the caramel -- but watch out for that steam! One the cream in incorporated, add the butter and vanilla. Pour about 3/4C of the caramel over your 9" pan of brownies, a chill in the fridge. The brownies should be kept somewhat cool because the caramel will "melt" a little at room temperature.
  3. Patrick S

    Baking 101

    I've never had this work right. There is a mousse recipe that I've tried several times that calls for cool whipped cream to be folded into warm chocolate, and each time I've ended up with small bits of chocolate that don't get worked into the mixture. Vigorously working in a small portion of the cream first seemed to help, but I still ended up with bits of chocolate in the mousse. The same recipe called for folding in some pate a bombe after the cream. But I found that it comes together much better if the pate a bombe is folded into the chocolate first, and then the whipped cream.
  4. Thank your for posting this, Mike! That's interesting that half of the whites are folded into the batter unbeaten! How are 'old whites' defined? Are whites that have sit in a tupperware container in the fridge old, or do they need to be out of the fridge for some time? Also, do you let these sit out for some time before putting them into the oven?
  5. I think wheat starch is basically wheat flour which has had almost all of the protein removed.
  6. Depending on which dessert we're talking about, its some combination of refrigeration, banging on a table, a thin sharp chef's knife, acetate strips, and a cake leveler. Its funny because when I look at my own pictures, I immediately notice all the deviations from perfect geometry, and it makes me cringe. ← You make your bed with hospital corners, don't you? ← I'm not obsessive in general, just about food. Honest. I actually fall more into the camp of 'Why make the bed if you're just going to mess it up again later?'
  7. I never let the whites sit out anymore. Just like you, I have a a container of whites the fridge that I'm always adding to and taking from. The only thing I do is heat the whites by placing the bowl into some hot water for a few minutes. If you want a flatter shape, you can try smacking the baking sheet on the counter, or lifting it up and dropping it onto a hard surface -- unless the batter is super-stiff, they will flatten out a bit.
  8. I'm kicking myself for not keeping better notes, but I'm pretty sure I made these orange macarons using the base recipe on this page, and adding 1-2t of fine orange zest and some orange coloring. The macarons were very stable.
  9. Good job! I see you got not only 'feet', but 'hats' as well. I'll give you a tip if you want to try to get rid of them. After you pipe them out, let them dry for a bit, and you can gently press them down with you finger. If they are too sticky and stick to your finger, wait a little longer, or dust them with cocoa powder first.
  10. Depending on which dessert we're talking about, its some combination of refrigeration, banging on a table, a thin sharp chef's knife, acetate strips, and a cake leveler. Its funny because when I look at my own pictures, I immediately notice all the deviations from perfect geometry, and it makes me cringe.
  11. Ann, I'll PM the recipe to you. I would post it here, but it would be a pain to rewrite the whole thing in a copyright-friendly way.
  12. I don't have PH10, BUT this post on FOODBEAM describes the macaron recipe in PH10 a little, and the description sounds exactly like the the recipe -- tant por tant, italian meringue, etc -- that Nicole Kaplan posted here. NK says this recipe is actually from Herme. I made a 1/8 batch, and sure enough they came out lookign exactly like Herme's: 250g powder sugar 250g almond flour 30g dutch cocoa 250g sugar 187g egg whites
  13. It could also be that the onion rings they use for photography are either fake or are chosen for their uniformity. ← Possible, but I don't think so. Here's a picture of 3 BK onion rings on someone's blog, and they appear to be similarly uniform.
  14. Michael, Anthony, Cheryl, alanamoana -- you all have been very helpful. Thank you so much!
  15. Check out this image of BK onion rings. They are remarkably uniform in size. ETA: So either 1) BK has discovered a variety of onion that grows in a perfectlycylindrical shape of consistent diameter from plant to plant, 2) is spectacularly wasteful and uses only onion slices of a given diameter , or 3) they are extruded.
  16. Well, I don't know if the onion rings are extruded or not, but both sodium alginate and calcium chloride are listed as ingredients in the onion rings. BK nutrition infor (PDF format)
  17. Thanks, Digijam. I definitely made some accidental caviar just from having drops fall off the spoon I was using to make ravioli. I'd like to try a dropper or syringe; any ideas on where I can find one, and what size I can get? I imagine the type used medically is too small, but maybe I'm wrong. ← I think you can buy syringes OTC at drug stores in most states.
  18. So is corn syrup, honey, and maple syrup considered "polysaccharides" and not sugar? These sugars were just converted through hydrolysis. ← Corn syrup, honey, and maple syrups are not sugars at all, at least not in chemical terms. I think that they are more properly considered solutions of monosaccharide and disaccharide sugars. For instance, corn syrup is essentially a sugar solution dominated by the monosaccharides glucose and fructose in varying amounts (and some other stuff, probably small amounts of other sugars). Honey is a solution containing roughy equal parts of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose, a small amount of the disaccharides sucrose and maltose (and some other stuff). Maple syrup is a solution mainly of the disaccharide sucrose with small amonts of fructose and glucose. So none of these are polysaccharides, or contain much polysaccharides -- they are solutions of mono- and disaccharides.
  19. The MSDS for sodium alginate lists these as possible symptoms of ingestion, so this is an effect probably inherent to sodium alginate. However, I doubt this a common side effect, because sodium alginate is one of the main ingredients in Gaviscon, a drug used to treat heartburn -- once ingested, the alginate forms a gel "raft" on the top of the stomach contents, so that if gastric reflux occurs, it is the less-irritating alginate raft that contacts the esophagus rather than the acidic stomach contents.
  20. Well, thanks! The attraction is just convenience, really. I like the idea of a tub-o-glaze that is glossy, stores well and just needs to be heated. . . I haven't used a great many glazes, but I can tell you that I really like the Herme glaze -- though it take a little time to make and on one occasion cracked on refrigeration. I tried Sherry Yard's glaze recently (not on the Halsey tart, incidentally) and didn't like it near as much -- too viscous and not shiny enough.
  21. I see that Assouline and Ting has some premade Valrhona pate a glacer (chocolate coating), which I've never seen before. Can anyone who uses this product, or another type of premade chocolate pate a glacer, tell me about this stuff, for instance how it tastes compared to a ganache, and how firm it is at room temperature (i.e. is it too firm to use as a glaze over mousse or eclairs)? Thanks in advance!
  22. Right, and a quick googling shows numerous examples of cellulose being described as a sugar (examples: 1 2 3 4 5), so I dunno. Obviously I am not implying that polydextrose or cellulose are sugars by the culinary or nutritional definitions, which is why I italicized the word chemically. I guess my question, which clearly has no practical import or relevance to your thread (sorry Scott!) is: are all polysaccharides themselves considered sugars? If so, then polydextrose, cellulose and starch, which are all polysaccharides made up of glucose units linked to each other in different ways, are themselves sugars. ETA: I found one article explaining that, by convention, mono-, di- and tri-saccharides are referred to as sugars, while saccharides with more than 3 subunits, i.e. polysaccharides, are just referred to as polysaccharides.
  23. According to CI, potato flour is made from dried and ground peeled potatos, and is 85% starch. Potato starch on the other hand is made when water is used to extract the starch fraction from the potato flour, removing almost all of the that 15% of other stuff in potato flour. Potato flour will do most of the things that potato starch will do, it just brings along the not necessarily desirable flavors and colors of the non-starch fraction of the potato flour.
  24. ...and following up on that, I hope someone will explain where clabber fits into the mix, as in clabbered milk or clabbered cream. (I can still hear my grandmother saying "it clabbered my guts when I saw you up that tree!" but I'm not talking about clabbered guts! ) I think clabber is closely related to creme fraiche. It might even be exactly the same thing, echoed across the pond. But I'm not sure. And is clabber just thickened milk, or the beginning of sour milk? ← My understanding is that clabbering is the same thing as curdling -- the casein proteins in milk, which are normally dispersed and in soution, precipitate out of solution when the acidity of the milk increases. This occurs in souring milk when streptococci bacteria convert lactose to lactic acid, but any acid added to milk will do the same thing.
  25. Please forgive my nitpickery, but isn't polydextrose, being a glucose polysaccharide, chemically a sugar, even though it behaves physiologically as a fiber? I thought all chemicals ending in "-ose" were sugars, but I could certainly be wrong.
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