pastrygirl

Yeah, I was going to check it out too. ← I downloaded it, maybe I could mail it to you? PM me with your address and I'll forward it.

Looking forward to my first trip to Australia in a few weeks, and would welcome any suggestions for restaurants with FABULOUS desserts, and great high-end pastry or chocolate shops in Sydney and Melbourne. In MEL I'll be staying in Carlton & relying on public transport/taxi, haven't booked for SYD yet. I'm a pastry chef looking for inspiration, surprises, delights - of course I'll have to try a traditional pavlova or two, but am more interested in what the best & brightest & wackiest & fanciest pastry chefs in Australia are doing right now. Thanks!

Bhutanese is definitely a contender for hottest. The national dish is ema datse, green chilies cooked with cheese. Eaten for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or all three. Hot chilies are used as a vegetable, not a mere small flavoring component. Depending on the heat of the particular chili, it ranges from very very hot to face-melting. Ema datse can also be made with torn up dried red chilies, or sometimes mushrooms, green beans, tomatoes, or other vegetables are added, but it is still always at least half chilies. Meat dished often have a generous portion of chilies added, and momo dumplings are usually eaten with a spicy ezay, or condiment of chilies, and usually tomato, onion, and garlic. People also eat ezay as a bar snack. They also use tinge, or szechuan pepper in some dishes. It can be difficult to get a local restaurant to cook dishes with anywhere near the full amount of chili if you are foreign, a lot of places presume that we only want french fries. I like spicy food and can usually take the heat, but can eat only some of the food that the staff makes, sometimes it is just to painful, no matter how much rice you have to go along with it. A few Bhutanese have expressed to me that they would love to try to go work in the US, but are worried that we don't have chilies there and they wouldn't have anything to eat. I assure them that chilies and rice are widely available in many varieties, but I think they don't believe me.

Just be careful with how strong your vacuum is - I vac packed some at work, and the vacuum was a little too strong and cracked them. Oooooops!

Well, I'd subscribe just to support them, because I want to support any good publication that has to do with pastry and my industry. Not only that, if I downloaded and printed out back issues, I'd probably spend the same amount in printer ink than if I just subscribed in the first place! ← Good point, and if I were at home, I'd look forward to getting it in the mail. I was in more of a 'I could subscribe and have Mom mail it to me in three months and hope it doesn't get lost on the way or wait 7 month until I get home or I could download it now' frame of mind. I opted for now.

This was in San Francisco three years ago, so I can't blame the Himalayas this time. The chocolate discs were tempered chocolate, if it had been a cookie it probably would have soaked into the cookie instead of weeping onto the sheet pan. Could have been condensation, or maybe my recipe was off - if I recall I added extra whole egg to make it a little firmer so it would stand up. Also everything in that restaurant was broken and we had a serious moisture problem in that reach-in & had to clean out standing water from the bottom on a regular basis...wow, I don't really want to recall too much more of that particular nightmare...but yeah maybe there were other factors.

I've done it and did get weeping. I had a chocolate 4 ways on a menu, with one of the item being a creme brulee baked in a fleximold, frozen, unmolded, placed on a chocolate disc and allowed to thaw. There was always a little juice on the sheet pan after they had thawed. So what is the secret?

At a glance, it looks like only the regional showcases are different and the main feature articles are the same in the different versions. I gave up on Pastry A&D a few years ago when I got tired of their top 10 pastry chefs in the US being French all the time and have been relying on the occasional dessert in Art Culinaire for my pastry porn, but now this....I'm off in search of a color printer to print as many pages as I can! (Or maybe I'll subscribe.) Soooo, if you can download it, why subscribe? If you go to the online editions and select print all pages, you then download it as a PDF and you can print from the PDF. Maybe they aren't going to have all editions online? Free pastry porn?

I bet you could add peanut butter to your favorite french buttercream recipe, maybe as a replacement for some of the butter in the recipe. If you can add chocolate or lemon curd, why not peanut butter?

Hard to say much without knowing exactly how much you can see. A few years ago I had an assistant who, due to albinism, had severely degenerated eyesight. He was hired as a line cook but it freaked the sous chefs out to watch him hold things 5 inches in front of his face to look at them, so he got sent to pastry. (he would say, 'I just can't see things far away' but far away appeared to be anything more than 6 inches.) Ironically, even though he was a line cook at heart and hated pastry, he did a way better job than my other assistant, who claimed to really want to be in pastry, but was really slow and not as talented overall. I guess my point is that desire to make it happen and desire to make good food can be more important than sight. You're in Bellingham, did you ever hear about the restaurant in Seattle run entirely by blind and/or visually or hearing impaired people? It's closed now, but it was the Ragin' Cajun restaurant in the Pike Place Market. It can be done. It seems like organizing things so they are always in the same place would help a lot, so you don't have to look to see them, and if you could have a really easily cleanable kitchen that you could just hose down. Your ability to see small details will also determine what kind of food you are making. Braised lamb shanks on polenta are going to be easier to deal with than napoleons with fillo dough and micro greens. Is school an option to fill in the gaps in your knowledge?

Regular rice flour seems to get hard instead of sticky or soft.

Better for saving space? I gotta say I vote no to cold cookies.

How much of your pastry really needs to be kept refrigerated? If you are doing your mousse cakes for retail, or a lot of cheesecake, or jars of lemon curd that might justify it but a whole lot of stuff is better at room temperature (health dept allowing). I don't have any answers either. How about a little countertop sushi refrigerator? If you only need a little space and can restock from a larger chiller they are less than $10k... http://www.sushi-knifes.com/Merchant2/merc...ategory_Code=SR

Can you use the rice itself instead of the flour? I tried making mochi yesteday with Thai sticky rice, and it turned out OK. I steamed it then put it in the food processor, which it threatened to kill (liiiiitle too sticky) - if I did it again I would add a little hot water to try to keep things moving. Or I would try a stand mixer with a dough hook to try to make a dough but I don't know if that would break the rice up enough. Otherwise, maybe tapioca flour would be similarly sticky?

I've recommended this cake to many people, and they've all loved it. Some used a 9x13, and others used two 9" rounds. (If I were to make it for myself, I'd cut down on the sugar and salt, and use 1 cup brewed espresso and 1 cup water instead of the 2 cups water). You can use a chocolate water glaze to top it. Crazy Chocolate Cake http://www.recipezaar.com/53524 ← Thanks, I tried that one today and I was really surprised at how good it was! Just a slightly gummy texture, but in truth probably not noticeably different from my regular chocolate cake recipe. My coconut milk ganache was too soft but would make a great frosting for the cake. Tomorrow I'll be on a vegan muffin quest, I'll post recipes later if I find some good ones.

Michael - I realize that with a name like 'grand cru' you are probably focusing on wines, but to me the menu makes it look like it is all about the wine and the food is an afterthought or secondary. Usually the food is listed first in the bolder font and the wine is underneath. I also would not put the words 'palate cleanser' on a menu. If you need to title the course, call it an intermezzo or refreshment or something clever and list melon and champagne as the description. Also, among people 45 or so and younger, particularly in places with a large Asian population, 'oriental' is no longer the preferred term for things that come from or are inspired by Asia. It is not the Orient, it is Asia, the people are Asian, what used to be Chinatown is the International District (at least in Seattle where the part of town in question truly is International with Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and more). It would be more descriptive and not offensive to speak of the flavor of the vinaigrette - 'oriental' is not a flavor per se. Sesame vinaigrette, yuzu-shiso vinaigrette, wasabi vinaigrette, ume-sansho vinaigrette, whatever.

It has finally occurred to me that I need to put together a collection of vegan recipes for those occasional guests with special diets. Oh fun. I need a few breakfast pastries, cookies, and cakes. There are some good starting points here, but I am finding that a lot of the recipes online ask for ingredients that I don't have here. What I DON'T have: silken tofu, margarine, shortening, soy milk (can get it, but it has added milk fat so not vegan), flax seed, egg replacer, succanat, maple syrup, commercial fruit juice concentrates, dates What I DO have: vegetable oil, olive oil, coconut milk/cream, honey (I know it's not vegan but I'm looking at this more from an allergy standpoint than a moral 'oh those poor little bees' standpoint), apples, bananas, prunes, dried apricots, raisins, peanut butter, most other basic ingredients. Also agar-agar, pectin, tapioca flour, can those be used as binders at all? I think I could replace the soymilk in recipes with coconut milk, but I can't have everything tasting of coconut. Olive oil scones? Any cookies recipes with oil instead of creamed solid fat? I'm just waiting for some gluten free vegan billionaire to come on her private jet and demand a chocolate cake better be ready!

Is your liqueur different from creme de cacao? I like creme de cacao but it doesn't really seem that chocolate-y. As for your caramel, it will still bubble and spatter when you add hot liquid, but you won't get that maddening hardening of your sugar that then has to be re-melted that you get when you add cooler water.

If you are adding a fairly high proportion of cream to chocolate - like for a thinner ganache for pouring - I find it helps to pour only about half of the cream over the chocolate and whisk until melted, then whisk in the rest of the cream. If you add too much cream all at once, sometimes you don't get a nice emulsion, but it looks sort of granular and like the chocolate is not completely melted.

For pear liqueur, have you tried Belle de Brillet? It's pear infused cognac, quite yummy.

One teaspoon is not a lot of baking powder for 4 cups of flour, if the cookies usually are lighter and cakier maybe it is supposed to be 1 tablespoon? That would still be less than 1 tsp per cup.

Marsala or masala? I hope the latter. Hey, typos happen Last summer while out for a cocktail I overheard some guy telling his friends how much he loves chicken tiki marsala. I think he meant chicken tikka masala, but you never know, they might have some wacky Polynesian-Italian fusion going on in Denver.

It's too bad you can't just leave them at Freeway Park or somewhere close where there are poor hungry people, but that is probably illegal dumping or something. Do schizophrenic alcoholics even like pastry? Not meaning to be offensive to people merely down on their luck who need assistance, but the Seattle street population has a lot more problems than just $$. What's sort of a dilemma too, is giving cake to people who need food. They need better nutrition than most muffins, but maybe a treat every now and then will really help lift some spirits? The discounting thing is difficult and everyone else here is probably right, either wait until the very last hour or don't do it. With the idea of sporadic and unpredictable discounts and just with the way people are, I could see some people getting angry if yesterday they got a discount at 4:15 when there were 4 muffins left but today there are 10 muffins so no discount at 5:00. Waste is just part of cooking, I know it is heartbreaking to throw things away, but if charity doesn't work out, at some point you just have to accept a certain amount of waste. Throwing stuff away gets easier after a while, you just have to be emotionally unattached.

I probably never would have though of that until it was way too late. Is it merely a practical consideration or the sort of thing the health department would be onto? I'm not that into bread baking, but I'm sure if I had a pastry shop there would be at least some brioche happening.

Great idea. I picked up some LorAnn oils when I was home, but so far have only experimented with flavoring solid chocolate pieces, not ganache. A few drops go a long way. https://www.lorannoils.com/