Patrick S

If you buy 1kg quantity Valrhona manjari from chocosphere, the price before shipping works out to about $0.85 per ounce. Even if you buy 3kg, the price is still about $0.75 per ounce. My favorite low-cost chocolate is Callebaut, which you can get for roughly $0.50 per ounce when you buy 1kg, about about $0.40 per ounce at 5kg.

I think mine is a Salter too, and it was about $40. 11lb capacity, tare function, display in grams or ounces, 2g accuracy. The scale I had before this one I actually bought for less than $20 on Ebay. It was almost as good, but only had 2.2lb capacity. I got a good year out of it before it malfunctioned.

Along those lines, my friend makes a dip by combing Harry and David's Pepper & Onion Relish with cream cheese. I bet that would make a fine filling too.

Question: what's the best way to pipe very large eclairs? Can you buy piping tips that are large enough, like 1-2"? Right now I just cut the end off of a disposable pastry bag and pipe without a tip (because my largest tip is 1/2"), but I'm wondering if there is a better way. Personally, I don't bother. The Ong recipe that a lot of us are using bake up very hollow, and if you let them dry in the oven a good bit, there really isn't any squishy stuff to remove.

Looks great, Ling!

Mostly you are paying for the higher amount of crop loss due to organic farming methods. My brothers had a certified organic small grains farm for several years and their yield was lower due to a higher incidence of pest and weed damage. ← True, lower average yield/lower efficiency of organic farming methods does explain why organic produces costs more, but I think John was wondering why consumers of organic produce pay more, which is a different question. The answer to that question is answered by a number of organic consumer surveys where people are asked why they buy organic food. There are a variety of different reasons expressed in these surveys, but the dominant theme is always that organic food is percieved to be "chemical-free" and "more healthy or nutritious."

True, but on the other hand, people with lower incomes can actually afford to shop at Walmart.

Last question first -- I don't think it matters if you start out with too much water. You can make a 70% sucrose syrup from a 60% sucrose syrup, or a 10% syrup, etc. No matter what ratio of sugar to water you start out with, the boiling temperature will tell you when you've reached the right concentration. As far as the theory goes, if you're asking for a physical explanation of the relationship between boiling temperature, sucrose concentration, and refractice index (what a refractometer measures), I'm not much help. What I can do is refer you to this page, which lists the boiling points of sucrose solutions from 40-95% sucrose.

plk, please report back if you have any success.

I don't use a refractometer, but my understanding is that a reading of 72-73 Bx indicates a solution that is 72-73% sucrose. If that is the case, you don't necessarily need a refractometer. The temperature of the boiling syrup will tell you the sucrose concentration. At sea level, the boiling point of a sucrose solution at will be 222F at 70% sucrose, and 227F at 75% sucrose. So mix your sugar and water, boil until you get to 222-227F as measured on a thermometer, and you should have a syrup that is 70-75% sucrose.

So, we can't exactly avoid the pesticides after all? ← No, of course we can't, for reasons that go well beyond mere contamination by sythetic pesticides. In fact, let's suppose that tonight, while we sleep, an omnipotent being causes every last trace of synthetic pesticide to vanish from the face of the earth. What effect would this have on our total pesticide exposure? It would, theoretically*, reduce it by about 0.01%. *The reduction would be theoretical, because it is possible that plants not protected by exogenous pesticides could increase their production of endogenous pesticides as a result of increased predation. We know, for example, that corn grown organically can have much higher levels of the carcinogenic mycotoxin fumonisin. This is because the organic corn plants suffer more damage from insect predation, and the more damage their is, the more mycotoxin-producing fungi colonize the plant. The following is reposted from a previous thread: Remember, there are 5-10,000 natural pesticides in our diet, and only 72 have been tested so far. This list will grow. As Ames et al (1990, p. 7777) point out: "it is probable that almost every fruit and vegetable in the supermarket contains natural plant pesticides that are rodent carcinogens." Ames et al, 1990. Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87, 7777-7781. Gold et al, 2002. Misconceptions about the causes of cancer. In: Human and Environmental Risk Assessment: Theory and Practice, D. Paustenbach, ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1415-1460.

I don't know about full-blown anaphylaxis from peanut dust, or about the specific case described above, but it is true that in a small number of people who are extremely sensitive, there can be a measurable reaction to doses much less than 1mg. Wensing et al (2002) conducted a placebo-controlled, double-blind food challange of 26 people with history of peanut allergy, and found that symptoms could be provoked with as little as 100 micrograms (which is just 1/10th of a milligram). This is the lowest threshold dose -- the lowest dose that produced measurable symptoms. In their study, the threshold dose ranged from 100 micrograms to 1gram, and 50% of the subjects had a threshold of 3mg or less. Wensing et al, 2002. The distribution of individual threshold doses eliciting allergic reactions in a population with peanut allergy. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 110(6):915-20.

Well, the glaze is from the book, the pastry cream is based on the one in the book too. The choux is Ong's recipe.

9147 0, 510 37 9411 842 3420….78 2 21? ← Oooh, that's one of my favorites! I love to top it with a little of the old standby, 00110101011010010111110011010100101010101010101011110101.

Tonight I'm having eclairs filled with coffee-infused pastry cream, and glazed with some of valrhona 61% glaze I had in the freezer.

Here's a thought that relates Pi to pie: if Pi is really an irrational number, which is to say that it truly never repeats or terminates, then every pie recipe that exists, indeed every pie recipe that can exist, is represented in numeric form somewhere in the digits in Pi. For that matter, every bit of information that can be represented numerically (for instance, the precise text of all the posts to this thread), would have to be represented somewhere in the digits of Pi.

FWIW, sarensho, I do seem to remember the dacquoise needing a little more than 30 minutes, but I can't remember exactly how long.

If you want to try the neoclassic buttercream but dont want to buy the book, you can find the recipe here.

If it isn't asking too much, what temperature and baking time does PH recommend for his dacquoise recipe? Thanks. ← 325F for 25-30 minutes, or until lightly browned. John, your daquoise looks delicious!

There are several possibilities, though without more information I can't tell you which if any is correct in this case. One possibility is that cheddar cheese contains benzene at a level just about the detection threshold, so that when it is combined with (diluted by) other ingredients to make American cheese, the resulting product contains benzene at a level below the detection threshold. Another possibility is simply that there is a wide variability in the benzene content of cheddar, depending on where it is manufactured, or depending on differences in production techniques. If thats the case, its possible that the FDA American cheese samples were from a manufacture that used a low benzene cheddar.

If your yolks are hot when you add the syrup, you can easily push the mixture past 160F, which would be sufficient. If you wanted to be absolutely sure that your yolks are pasteurized, you could heat the yolks in a double boiler to 140 or so, so the syrup would just have to heat it up 20 more degrees.

Sorry to hear that, K8.

The only problem is that more gluten makes the dough a PITA to shape, at least if you're trying to make the dough really thin.

The pessimist in me says it's three cases that we know of...how many were not reported and quietly buried or ground into some homemade cattle feed? If my math is correct, that works out to be about .07 percent being tested, which is frightening small. What's the statistical minimum of tested animals needed to make testing a valid representation of the whole? Somehow I think it would be a lot more than 20,000 cattle. Any SSB's in the room? ← The incidence of testing is very low in Canada and the U.S., compared to EU or Japan (where every slaughtered animal is tested). We could do better. ← Yes, of course we could do better. And in a world with unlimited resources, it would be an easy call. The thing is, we have limited resources available as it is (the federal government is already spending far more than they take in taxes). And when you consider that the BSE surveillance done so far indicates that the incidence of BSE in this country is infinitesimal, and that the safegaurds already in place will prevent the prevalence from being amplified (via feed), and since even now, almost ten years after the ruminant feed ban, we have yet to see even a single (!) domestic case of vCJD, I think it really is fair to ask whether or not the money we might spend on further BSE testing might not be better spent on some other food safety issue. Remember that, according to the CDC, conventional food poisoning causes 6 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths every year. And in the UK, which is probably as close to the worst-case scenario as we'll ever see -- even at the height of the vCJD epidemic there, the death toll was something like 30 per year. 30 tragic deaths, for sure, but so are the 5000 that occur every year from salmonella, listeriosis, E. coli and so forth. No one can or should dispute that BSE is a risk, that testing of the national herd on some level has to occur, that compliance with the feed ban has to be monitored, but there is plenty of room for discussion (I think) about how much to spend on a problem, and how much risk is acceptable. That's all I'm sayin'.

Apparently you didn't bother to read the several posts immediately preceding your where we discussed this very issue. Based on what's been presented so far, it would appear you've got your facts all wrong. Apparently, Monsanto only objected to those labels which were could be (and usually were) mistaken by consumers as implying that some milk contained artificial hormones, but theirs did not. This is very different from claiming merely that you have not used artificial hormones in the production of the milk. Labels that are clear as to this crucial distinction between milk composition and milk production techniques have never generated any legal action, so far as I can tell, nor should they. Well, first of all, no one has stated that all state labeling laws are based on junk science, merely that many of them are, and that, more importantly, there is apparently no mechanism at the state level to try to determine which is which. My own view is that they span the whole spectrum from utterly absurd to perfectly reasonable. And as I've already stated several times, I'm not necessarily opposed to states being able to add warning labels, I just think that there should exist an expert concensus (i.e. amongst toxicologists and epidemiologists rather than politicians) that the label is addressing an actual human health risk. Now, to the example of benzene. First of all, we should recognize that benzene is produced both synthetically and naturally, and is present in many foods and drinks, not just soft drinks. It just happens to be present at a higher concentration in soft drinks, due to a reaction of sodium/potassium benzoate with ascorbic acid. The following comes from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) toxicological profile for benzene: You literally will ingest more benzene from breathing than you will from drinking a "contaminated" soda. That's according to George Pauli, the very FDA food safety expert that sounded the "alarm" recently about benzene in soft drinks. In fact, according to most experts who study this particular issue, >99% of the average person's exposure to benzene is via inhalation (e.g. MacLeod and Mackay, 1999), and only a very small fraction of your exposure comes from dietary sources. If you want to reduce your benzene exposure in a far more effective way, you should avoid automobile exhaust, cooking smoke, and tobacco smokers. You might also consider opening your windows, since the air inside the home tends to contain a much higher concentration of benzene than the air outside. Assuming you are indoors, the air you are breathing right now most likely has a benzene concentration of 2-5ppb. The water you drink also contains very low level of benzene. MacLeod, M., and D. Mackay. 1999. An assessment of the environmental fate and exposure of benzene and the chlorobenzenes in Canada. Chemosphere, 38(8): 1777-1796. Even in the most "contaminated" sodas levels we are talking about are levels for which there is literally no evidence of actual risk. The reason the case is regulatory borderline, however, is because the EPA has in fact established an "action level" of 5ppb in drinking water, and some soda contains benzene at levels as high as 10-20ppb. Since most people typically drink far more water than soda, and since FDA limits are set based on typical exposures, its not really clear what the "action level" for soda should be. More generally, I would say that if a state wants to add warning labels for benzene, just because it is known to be a carcinogen at high doses and even though there is no evidence at all that it is a human health risk at the enormously lower levels to which humans are exposed via diet, then at the very least, it should be consistent about it, and put warning labels on all the foods and drinks that are known to contain the chemical, not just soda. and warn about all the known carcinogens in food, rather than singling out only synthetic carcinogens, which contrary to popular belief constitute only a small fraction of our total dietary carcinogen exposure. For instance, the following foods: absinthe, allspice, anise, apple, apricot, banana, basil, beet, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cantaloupe, caraway, cardamom, carrot, cauliflower, celery, cherries, chili pepper, chocolate, cinnamon, citronella, cloves, coffee, collard greens, comfrey herb tea, corn, coriander, currants, dill, eggplant, endive, fennel, garlic, grapefruit, grapes, guava, honey, hon eydew melon, horseradish, kale, lemon, lentils, lettuce, licorice, lime, mace, mango, marjoram, mint, mushrooms, mustard, nutmeg, onion, orange, oregano, paprika, parsley, parsnip, peach, pear, peas, black pepper, pineapple, plum, potato, radish, raspberries, rhubarb, rosemary, rutabaga, sage, sesame seeds, soybean, star anise, tarragon, tea, thyme, tomato, turmeric, and turnip. . . .contain the following all-natural carcinogens: acetaldehyde methylformylhydrazone, allyl isothiocyanate, arecoline.HCl, benzaldehyde, benzyl acetate, caffeic acid, capsaicin, catechol, clivorine, coumarin, crotonaldehyde, 3,4-dihydro coumarin, estragole, ethyl acrylate, N2-γ-glutamyl-p-hydrazinobenzoic acid, hexanal methyl formylhydrazine, p-hydrazinobenzoic acid.HCl, hydroquinone, 1-hydroxy anthraqui none, lasio carpine, d-limonene, 3-methoxycatechol, 8-methoxypsoralen, N-methyl-N-formylhydrazine, α-methylbenzyl alcohol, 3-methylbutanal methylformylhydrazone, 4-methylcatechol, methyl eugenol, methylhydrazine, monocrotaline, pentanal methylformylhydrazone, petasitenine, quercetin, reserpine, safrole, senkirkine, sesamol, symphytine But it wouldn't stop there. Far from it. We'd also have to include warning labels on many if not all fried foods (like fried starchy foods that contain acrylamide), and certainly most smoked and grilled foods (which contain carcinogens like 2-amino-3-methylimidazo[4,5-f ]quinoline and benzo-a-pyrene), and the warning labels on coffee would certainly be quite extensive. It might read something like this: Coffee contains at least 21 known carcinogens, including acetaldehyde, benzaldehyde, benzene, benzofuran, benzo(a)pyrene, caffeic acid, catechol, 1,2,5,6-dibenzanthracene, ethanol, ethylbenzene, formaldehyde, furan, furfural, hydrogen peroxide, hydroquinone, isoprene, limonene, 4-methyl catechol, styrene, toluene, and xylene. Btw, these are just the ones we know about for sure, and there are literally hundreds of chemicals in coffee yet to be tested. So, if we decided to label everything that we know to contain carcinogens, I'm afraid we'd have to label just about everything, and it may in fact end up being impossible for the average consumer to decide what's a risk and what's not. To me, it would make a lot more sense to restrict labeling to those cases where there is solid evidence of a human health risk. * Most of the data above comes from: Ames et al, 1990. Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87, 7777-7781. Gold et al, 2002. Misconceptions about the causes of cancer. In: Human and Environmental Risk Assessment: Theory and Practice, D. Paustenbach, ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1415-1460. I apologize for the length of this post. Sometimes there just no good way to make a long story short.