Apicio

Having learned a good (and costly) lesson from Bre-x, I stayed away from those bags for the simple reason that it just sounded too good to be true. After reading your report, I am going back to Costco tomorrow to pick up a few bags. If they are still there.

I do not wish to sound like a jerk who replies to a cooking problem query with “it does not happen to me” but before last Christmas LCBO brought in a small shipment. They were snapped up by their staff and whatever stock that remained disappeared in a few days. I had to chase for my bottle through three LCBO stores in Etobicoke. They might bring in another shipment if we generate enough clamor for it . I'll rally my bibulous friends to call them too.

A million thanks Marco Polo. This is what I have been wanting to ask for but has been too shy.

If French women do not get fat, who are the Frenchmen then referring to when they call somebody “vache” or “chamelle” when there are no other mammals around?

My favorite tofu dish to order in a Chinese restaurant is Ma Po Dofu, in a Japanese restaurant I would always start with Age Dashi Daofu but when I find myself in a Korean Restaurant, I have to try their version of Dofu Chigae and the fortune of these restaurants would rise or fall in my esteem with the quality of these dishes. At home I simply quarter a cake of hand-formed tofu (midway between silk and cotton) and deep fry them and eat them cooled down a bit with a douse of (Japanese) dipping sauce for noodles. Delish...

If you can get access to the October 1997 issue of Gourmet magazine, on page 250 under Forbidden Pleasures, you will find a wonderful recipe for “Crackling Pork Shank.” The author of the article claimed that he was lured by a New York Times restaurant review of Maloney & Porcelli, in midtown Manhattan, wherein the critic praised a dish of crackling pork shank, “an enormous mound of tender pork wrapped in its own crisp skin and served on an aromatic bed of poppyseed-sprinkled sauerkraut.” I cook this to reward myself each time I get a clean bill of health from my cardiologist.

“Always go for dim sum with Chinese speaking friends/colleagues!” This aphorism is worthy of entry into a book called “Life’s little instruction book” that came out in the early 90s. It should also be followed with: “Learn to use chopsticks if you look Asian.” It will save you all the contempt that they reserve for people asking for fork in Asian restaurants.

I got started on Henessy VSOP around 1973 when after tasting Remy Martin and Le Courvoisier, I wanted to try something different from from what my two friends have kind of settled on. I was living in Toronto then and I remember asking my brother-in-law to buy me some when he came on business trips to Calgary after worked moved me there. I used to stock up too on them when I came back for visits to Toronto because they were not offered by the Alberta Liquor Board. And then I discovered that the least costly ones can be obtained on the duty-free shops along the US-Canada border. I would buy what was allowed every time I crossed the border and at US$45 per 750 ml bottle (this was early 80s) that was how I accumulated my cache of Henessy XOs. I suspect that ultimately, the quality and appeal of a particular brand of cognac rises or fall with the decisions taken by the house blender. This is specially true of the major cognac houses that draw on more or less the same source. From time to time I will be treated to a particularly impressive sample of expensive cognac (such as when Sam in Chicago offered me a dollop of Pierre Ferand Abel in a plastic sampling beaker or when the same brother-in-law offered me a sampling from his beautiful bottle of Louis XIII?.) but time and time again I would fall back on my preferred after-dinner spirit. I am content to think that my first experience hardwired me for it.

Try a Vietnamese store and ask a clerk for it because they usually keep them behind the counter. Or you can go back to that Philippine store and find out if they have the frozen leaves. My principal objection with pandan extracts is their green colour is just so overpowering. If they can just develop a colourless one that would make my life complete.

The folks at Cooking Illustrated set out to find that the puddling underneath the meringue was due to undercooking and the beading of the top of the pie was from overcooking. When they applied the meringue when the filling was piping hot, the underside of the meringue did not undercook. A relatively low oven temperature did not overcook the top of the meringue and also produced the best-looking, most evenly baked meringue. They added a tiny amount of cornstarch to stabilize the meringue to stop it from weeping even on hot, humid days. I substituted an equal amount of confectioner’s sugar for the granulated sugar that the recipe asked for to inject that tiny quantity of cornstarch and it did the trick.

If you cannot adjust the timing of your automatic vacuum coffee pot, perhaps you can try adjusting your grind. You know, finer for slower pots and courser for the faster ones. And I assumed the biggest problem with this particular automatic vacuum pots was the "cracking" of the pot due to poor choice of material. A friend obtained (4) four new replacements for his cracked original and gave them away as presents because he did not want to use them anymore after I gave him a shiny fifty year old automatic Sunbean C30 I bought at e-bay for $10.50.

And so after your friend finished the main course and you have heated up your tarte tatin and you're just about ready to bring it to the table you tell your friend "Ta tarte tatin t'attende."

Exactly like Therese’s solution. Sliced three-ways lengthwise and fried. Sprinkle with white sugar and douse with rum or brandy.

andisenji, The rotary microplane rasp you linked to is cylindrical and far too refined for a mundane task as grating coconut. One touch of the coconut shell can dull its photoengraved teeth. The grater that you need that is available in most Indian, Thai and other South-east Asian stores is a hemispherical head attached to a crank and has a clamp that you can fasten on to your table board just like the meat grinders of old. You cup the half shell of coconut on your left hand, push it against the hemispherical blade and crank the handle with your right hand. Most Thai cookbooks show this in their list of essential kitchen equipment. But on a more practical note though, I know a fastidious cook here in Toronto who scorns at the use of frozen grated coconut and therefore grates them fresh. He buys them wholesale by the boxfull but finds that one out of five coconuts is rancid and spoiled.

The following smells are like Proust’s madeleines dunked in tisane for me: 1. Baking cake, may it be fruitcake, chocolate cake or pineapple upside down cake; 2. Brewing coffee; 3. The aroma of jasmine rice (or any newly harvested rice) cooking; 4. Anything cooked with lemongrass. 5. Barbecuing meat that has been marinated with garlic. Although I can survive on Korean food alone, I find the whiff of a lot of their panchan disagreeable, worst is anything with daikon.

chrisamirault, Here’s how I do it: 1. Punch a hole on coconut to drain water; 2. Bake in a 300 degree oven for around 20 minutes; 3. Place the coconut in a strong garbage or burlap bag, go out on your terrace and smash it against concrete floor. 4. Pick the meat from the shards of shell; 5. Place in blender or food processor with water, process until completely liquified; 6. Strain and extract with a potato ricer or by wringing in a clean flour sack. If you want immaculate coconut miilk, the brown skin on the coconut milk has to be peeled off and that is a lot of work. But an even easier way is to pick up packages of frozen coconut milk from asian groceries carrying Filipino foodstuffs. It is not as good as freshly squeezed but much better than the canned. You can toast the squeezed pulp and use it like streusel on puddings and muffins. Apicio

I have a clipping from the The New York Times Magazine from 1980 of Laura Brody’s chocolate cherry torte which Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey preambled with the following that might just shed some light on the definition of “torte”: “Contrary to what many people seem to believe, the difference betwen a European style torte and an American cake is more than just semantics. While a torte is certainly a cake, a cake is not necessarily a torte. Basically, a torte is a cake - generally German, Austrian or French - in which part or all of the flour is replaced by fine, fresh bread crumbs and finely ground nuts. A standard cake in this country has a somewhat grainy texture, or “crumb,” while a torte has a fairly firm yet moist texture.” I have been following the recipe by the way this last 24 years, and its is a marvellous chocolate torte filled with sour cherries topped with a layer of marzipan and glazed with shiny dark chocolate. Apicio

To Caroline, Oh yes we do. We call it redundantly as “leche flan.” And it is the mainstay of desert tables of all manners of celebrations and town fiestas all over the islands. It is always made like your “flan magico” sans the cream cheese and flavored with rasped lime zest. Because we really do not have a dairy industry to speak of there and Australia is so close, we use what can be imported, that is evaporated and condensed milk. We indulge our ingenuity though on the eggs. Kitchens on tight budgets use whole eggs, well stocked pantries use only the yolks and the really fastidious cooks only use yolks from eggs laid by indigenous free range chickens. Eggs from battery fed white leghorns and Rhode island reds simply won’t make the cut. Which brings me to another point: For Rancho, Can you show us a picture of the blue egg laying aurocana? I have seen Japanese roosters with very long trains of tail feathers and once drove a long way from Toronto to visit a farm raising guinea fowls. And if there was ever one thing that impressed me about Martha Stewart it was the fact that she kept a few layers to supply her with fresh eggs. What do you feed them? Have you tried flax seeds to make them lay omega 3 eggs? I read somewhere that in some parts of China chickens are fed mostly dried fish meal so KFCs there taste like fish and chips. For everyone: There is a revived old discussion about five threads above that dealswith cooking flans in pressure cookers but frankly those hissing vessels scare me silly. Depending on one’s preference, the texture will range between tender creaminess to chewy firmness. But another consideration is when unmolded, would the flan be able to stand poised and firm and not colapse in a flat puddle on the plate. So no matter what recipe you are following and no matter what method of cooking you are using, the flan is done when the centre is cooked. This is the point when only the centre jiggles when you gently nudge the pan, around the end of an hour in a 350 degree oven sitting in another pan filled with boiling water reaching to half the height of the flanera. Continue baking for another 10 to 20 minutes if you prefer it chewier. Apicio

Caro RG, If you are looking for less egginess, perhaps you should try reducing your whole eggs to 3 and your egg yolks to 2 which is what Cooking Illustrated's recipe for creme caramel calls for (along with 1.5 cups each of whole milk and heavy cream and 2/3 cup of sugar). This will not help you with the problem you are trying to solve though. Cooking it in bain marie avoids sudden intense oven heat which can curdle your mixture in a hurry. You want slow and gradual heat to obtain a smooth creaminess in your flan. Now, your custard pan with cover is most probably designed for steaming or cooking in a pressure cooker, to avoid boil overs. Using evaporated and/or condensed milk as a lot of Mexicans (and other Latin Americans) are fond of as witness their "Tres Leches cake," will yield a denser flan but still with the same quivering creaminess as long as it is cooked long and slow in either the oven in a bain marie or by steaming in a pressure cooker. Let me know if you need the temperature and cooking time.