Patrick S

Let me say first that I don't think you can fault Japan's decision. What happened was a violation of a trade agreement, and Japan has a right to respond as it sees fit. The idea that the number of cases of cattle infected with BSE is miniscule is not correct. It may be, it may not be. The truth of the matter is that the USDA has no idea how many cows may or may not be infected with the disease. ← I beg to differ. Thanks to the BSE Enhanced Surveillance Program, which is run by the USDA's Animal Health and Plant Inspection Service (APHIS), we actually have a very good idea of the prevalence of BSE in US cows, and can say without hesitation that it is miniscule. Based on hundreds of thousands of tests from the highest-risk cattle, t is currently thought that the prevalence of BSE in US cows is less than 1 per 15,000,000. Unless you are working from some idiosyncratic definition of the term, the prevalence of BSE in US cows is unquestionably 'miniscule.' The exceeding small number of samples that are inconclusive using the BSE quick screen are subjected to both western blot and IHC. There is little point to do the slower and much more expensive western blot on all samples, as opposed to the very few that are inconclusive from the rapid screen. The prevalence of BSE in humans is precisely zero. BSE is a cattle disease. Eating nervous tissue from cows infected with BSE can cause vCJD in humans, but not BSE. Of course it is correct that vCJD has a long latency period, but at this point we have no reason to believe that any cow with BSE ever entered the US food chain. That may have happened, but if it did, there is no reason to believe that it happened in large numbers. By contrast, according to the Wikipedia article on BSE, something like 400,000 BSE-infected cows are thought to have entered the food chain in the UK. Really? Which indicators are those? Please be specific. Even in the UK, which has lived through pretty much the worst case-scenario as far as BSE goes (hundreds of thousands of BSE-positive cows entering the food chain), it is estimated that the total death toll from vCJD will be about 200. That is horrible and tragic for those people that died, but in terms of public health, it is obviously an extremely infrequent cause of death. Again, I beg to differ. USDA/APHIS' BSE Enhanced Surveillance Program is testing about 30,000 cattle every month for BSE. Since June 2004, 589,833 high-risk cows have been tested, with only one confirmed result, which again occurred in a cow born before the 1997 ban on BSE-spreading feed practices. Of course. The number of cases of sickness and death resulting pathogens on produce dwarfs that from vCJD. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, there were 554 outbreaks associated with produce from 1900 to 2003, sickening 28,315 people. Granted, the number of deaths is going to be far lower than the number of people sickened, but I think your point is valid: far more instances of sickness and death are associated with unwashed produce than with vCJD.

Pan, I'm so glad you started this thread. My mother started dialysis 2 days after Christmas. Right now she is on hemodialysis via a shunt, but next week she is having a peritnoeal port implanted. I look forward to trying to come up with some low-K desserts!

You have good taste. Fresh ground Sumatran and Kenyan beans are both awesome to use with chocolate. I like the convenience of espresso powder, and as long as it is kinda in the background in a cake, tastes just fine. But if I am using a ganache that calls for espresso, for instance, I always use very strong coffee made with Sumatran or Kenyan beans. Its the same difference between instant coffee and fresh ground. ← I think you misunderstood. We were talking about using brewed espresso or brewed decaf espresso, not instant. ← My bad. For me its a moot point though, because I find that the very fine, powdery grind used for espresso makes it taste overwhelmingly bitter and generally not as good as plain old strong coffee made with a coarser grind. Maybe I just haven't had good espresso?

You have good taste. Fresh ground Sumatran and Kenyan beans are both awesome to use with chocolate. I like the convenience of espresso powder, and as long as it is kinda in the background in a cake, tastes just fine. But if I am using a ganache that calls for espresso, for instance, I always use very strong coffee made with Sumatran or Kenyan beans. Its the same difference between instant coffee and fresh ground.

I feel your pain. The hand mixer I occasionally use has a an interesting feature -- the beaters are ejected by pressing down on the on-off/speed dial. So when you try to eject the beaters -- which of course are going to be coated with meringue or cookie dough -- its easy to accidentally turn the mixer on high, flinging stuff everywhere. I've done that a couple of times.

Usually these estimates are based on some kind of cluster sampling. Researchers will divide the area of interest, say a whole country, into a set of clusters, randomly select a subset of those clusters to sample (by door-to-door survey, for instance), and then extrapolate the results from those clusters to the whole area of interest. Well, you are exactly right -- you have to take into account of the age distributions before you can compare incidence of of disease like Alzheimer's, which are strongly age-related. This is why, when you compare incidence rates between populations, the rates for each have to be age-adjusted rates. So, you couldn't just compare the Alzheimer's rate per 100,000 persons from Kerala to New York, for instance, but in theory you could compare the Alzheimer's rates per 100,000 person's 65-70 years old. Age-adjustment has to be done not only when you compare one geographic population to another, but also if you compare one population to itself at a different point in time.

8. The first time I had Chinese food was the most memorable. Me, my girlfriends and some friends had just returned from three days hiking in the mountains of eastern KY. We were exhausted and starving because we had survived on little more than granola bars, beer and acid for the entire trip. The town we lived in was very small, but had one Chinese restaurant. We had passed the place every day, but never stopped in. So, on the way back from the mountains, we stopped in and ordered all kinds of stuff, egg rolls, fried rice, lo meins. . . We ordered it for takeout, but the food was brought out on plates, so we ate there. Every bite was like manna from heaven. Though we looked like a bunch of wild-eyed raggamuffins, the family that operated the place treated us like old friends. Towards the end of the meal, an elderly woman of at least 80 years, who I later came to know as "Momma Dang," came out and sat next to us. She was the eldest of the Dang family, that operated the restaurant. She sat there with us for a good while just smiling, laughing when we laughed, occasionally speaking to us in Chinese (she spoke no English), just radiating this pure maternal goodness. She was so sweet and so friendly. I wanted to give her a big hug. But instead I just smiled, rubbed my belly in what I thought might be the universal "damn, that was good" gesture, and left a fat tip. We went back many times after that. I'm sure that was one of the most satisfying meals any of us ever had, or will have, even though we ate out takeout at the restaurant.

A creme brulee cookie without custard? Well, you're not going to get a drop cookie with anything like the silky texture of creme brulee, but you could make a vanilla cookie and blowtorch a caramel crust on it. You might try Sherry Yard's pastry cream cookies, leave out the nuts, increase the flour, and "brulee" some sugar on top.

Sure that air can circulate freely wheter its upright or inverted...but you should try both ways and compare the result. When you invert the pan and let it rest that way the cake is much softer and light. ← Of course. I'm not disagreeing with that at all. Maybe I wasn't clear. The chiffon will be softer and lighter because it does not loose volume, i.e. does not sink/sag under gravity. Whenever a cake looses volume, it increases in density. That's what I meant when I said the cake is inverted so that it doesn't deflate. So my point was not that cooling inverted doesn't make the cake lighter, but that it makes it lighter by preventing deflation rather than by facilitating air circulation. I've only made one cocoa chiffon, but I've made plenty of other types of chiffon cakes, and I always invert them on a wine bottle to cool (unless for some reason I'm baking them in something other than a tube pan).

Oops eheh just saw it sorry Anyway, if you take a look at therecipe I've posted on RecipeGullet, the method used is very different. The major difference, for me, its about the greased and floured pan - a chiffon, by definition, its cooked on a non-greased and non-floured pan. ← Personally, I would consider any cake in which the butter is replaced by oil and the whites are whipped to be a chiffon cake, whether they are baked in a tube pan or as a sheet. Actually, I think the point of inverting the chiffon is simply so that it doesn't deflate under gravity. After all, air can circulate just as freely around an upright cake pan on a rack as it can around a chiffon cake that has been inverted.

My favorite way to eat chocolate more-or-less straight is in truffles, either caramel-chocolate truffles made with a good bitter chocolate, or praline truffles with praline paste and a less bitter chocolate. For just unwrapping and eating, Valrhona Manjari with candied orange peel is one of my favorites.

Patrick, the recipe link you've posted goes to a tiramisu recipe... ← If you take a look, you'll see that it includes a recipe for cocoa chiffon cake.

Those are some of the best-looking madeleines I've seen.

That looks really delicious, filipe. I love cocoa chiffon; the only recipe I've tried is this one. I might try your recipe next time I make a chocolate cake. Is Maizena a corn starch?

Its Cook's Illustrated Orange-Spice Banana Bread. I used sour cream instead of yogurt, though. And I left out the walnuts. Its really good.

I tried a banana bread recipe that includes orange zest, and I'm sold on the combination. It doesn't really taste orange; rather, the orange just seems to accentuate the banana flavor.

Well that me clarify that I didn't hate it. I ate two pieces, one after it cooled and another this morning. But the taste seemed just a little bit pithy to me. The oranges I used were not very good, and that may have been a factor. I'm not knocking the cake in any general way, and I know a lot of people on Chocolate and Zucchini blog and elsewhere really rave about this type of cake.

Well, I assume that you are aware that "organic" does not and never has meant "pesticide-free," and that organic farmers are free to use, and do use, a number of pesticides that are toxic to non-target widllife, so long as they are not synthetic? For instance, organic farmers are free to use rotenone, which is derived from Derris root, but not the similar synthetic compounds fenazaquin, pyridaben, amidinohydrazone, hydramethylnon or perfluorooctanesulfonamide, even though rotenone, the organic pesticide, appears to have the higher acute mammalian toxicity among these compounds. Maybe the environmental farms have a lower aggregate environmental toxicity when all the pesticides, their relative toxicities and application rates are considered. I don't know. But I do know, from conversations with friends, that a lot of organic consumers are under the mistaken assumption that organic produce is grown without the use of pesticides.

Flourless orange-almond cake. I'll be honest -- I think this cake looks much better than it tastes. The batter uses whole oranges, which are simmered for 2 hours and pureed. The puree is mixed with almond meal, sugar, eggs and baking powder. Recipe

Caramel Souffle The recipe is from yard's Secrets of Baking. They're really easy. The recipe from memory: 9 large egg whites, room temp 5 large egg yolks, room temp 1/2C caramel sauce, room temp (I used Yard's) 1/3C sugar Pinch cream of tartar 2T soft butter, for ramekins 2T sugar, for ramekins Preheat oven to 425F Thoroughly butter and sugar coat six 6oz ramekins Whisk yolks into caramel sauce Beat whites till foamy. Add cream of tartar. Beat to soft peaks. Gradually beat in sugar. Beat to medium-firm peaks. Fold caramel base into whites. Fill ramekins. The recipe says fill them to the top, but you may want to fill them only 3/4. Run a paring knife around the side of the ramekin. This creates an air pocket and allows the souffles to rise more evenly. Baking 15-20 minutes. Drizzle with caramel sauce, powdered sugar, or anything else that sounds good to you, and serve immediately. ( RG1568 )

You could be right about the relative health risks. ← I don't think the evidence supports the view that beef is "way more of a health risk to eat" than beef, at least not for the reasons stated above. So far as we know, no one has ever gotten vCJD from eating US beef, and the practices that spread BSE in the UK were banned in the US a number of years ago. So I don't know how one would really calculate the health risks of "mad cow" from beef for US consumers. And as far as growth hormones in beef goes, I don't think there is any evidence that this presents any health risk either. The biggest concern seems to be over estrogens like estradiol. A 3oz serving of beef from a hormone-implanted steer has about 1.9ng of estrogen (compared to 1.3ng for a nonimplanted steer). By way of comparison, a glass of milk has 35ng, and a hen's egg has 1,750ng. A serving of cabbage has the phytoestrogen equivalent of 2,000ng of estrogen, while soy oil has the phytoestrogen equivalent of over 1,000,000ng of estrogen. To look at it another way, the endocrine system of the average adult human male produces 136,000ng of estrogen a day, while that of the adult human female produces an average of 480,000ng/day.

Actually 6 months ago, a scientific report was published by Berkley University where the people working on the genome mapping project had discovered 2 amino acids contained in oysters that are found nowhere else in nature. ← Finally, what I consider a good reason to eat oysters. Seriously though, the two amino acids in question, D-Asp and NMDA, are found in a great many species, including mammals. NMDA is the methylated version of D-Asp. What's unusual is that they are present in relatively higher contrations in bivavle molluscs, such as oysters. The researchers who did the work were not involved in genomics -- the group consisted of a chemist, two of his grad students, and a neurobiologist.

The recipe is from yard's Secrets of Baking. They're really easy. The recipe from memory: 9 whites, room temp 5 yolks, room temp 1/2C caramel sauce, room temp 1/3C sugar Pinch cream of tartar Preheat to 425F Thoroughly butter and sugar coat about 6-8 ramekins Whisk yolks into caramel sauce Beat whites till foamy. Add cream of tartar. Beat to soft peaks. Gradually beat in sugar. Beat to medium-firm peaks. Fold caramel base into whites. Fill ramekins. The recipe says fill them to the top, but you may want to fill them only 3/4. Run a paring knife around the side of the ramekin. This creates an air pocket and allows the souffles to rise more evenly. Baking 15-20 minutes. Drizzle with caramel sauce, powdered sugar, or anything else that sounds good to you, and serve immediately.

I have a ton of egg whites I need to use, so I made some caramel souffles. They puffed up a little more than I expected! They were good though.

I made a Napoleon with vanilla and Nutella pastry creams. I don't do these very often so I couldnt get it as pretty as I'd like, but it was actually very tasty. Next time I want to try rolling out the puff pastry layers really thin, and then filling them with thin layers of something firmer, like a ganache.