aschbren

Don't add sugar. Maybe it's part of my brewing philosophy, but I feel that the apple cider should be an expression of the apples they come from. When you chaptalize homemade cider, you're obscuring the apple-eyness of the cider. Also, don't be so concerned with final alcohol content. Allow it to ferment to the alcohol content corresponding to the amount of natural sugar in the apple cider. The objective of making an alcoholic beverage is to make it taste wonderful (while maintaining its integrity as a food product).

I would say anything that the critical cooking step was done well ahead of service. That eliminates how busy the restaurant is, who you are, etc. Anything braised, stewed, baked, or preserved would seem to be a good choice. One's you've made your terrine for the night, it's not like you can make a new one...

All of this talk about how to best preserve syrups by monkeying around with sugar and ethanol contents, periodic boiling, etc... Why bother? And besides... For me one of the rewarding things about making my own maraschino cherries/grenadine/etc is that it doesn't have preservatives in it. It takes like five minutes to make simple syrup if that. Seems easy enough for me. Then you don't have to worry about reformulating recipes to higher sugar-content syrups or changing around the alcoholic composition of a cocktail. If you have to store it, you can store it in the freezer (it probably won't freeze... at least it doesn't in mine). One nice touch I use is to caramelize sugar in a small amount of water before adding the rest of it to bring the temperature down and stop it where I want it. A nice caramelized syrup goes well with some rum-based cocktails...

If you have some time on your hands, a freezer, and a willingness to flaunt the law, you could make true apricot brandy at home. Start with pure apricot juice, freeze it slowly to remove water and increase the sugar concentration. Then add a cider yeast starter (available from a home brew store) and/or wine yeast and allow it to ferment for 3-6 months. At this point you'll have apricot wine. Now proceed as if you were making applejack and just freeze it repeatedly, discarding any ice that forms until it stops forming. The final alcohol concentration will depend upon the temperature of your freezer. When you make applejack, most people can achieve 60 proof using the freezer. As I noted above, I wouldn't tell the ATF if you do this as fractional crystallization is considered a form of distillation (i.e. technically a felony as if you were operating an illegal still). If you're sure the feds aren't going to raid your home, you should be fine though...

Being fond of Scandinavian foodstuffs (well, almost everything; I can't abide lutefiske) I tried to find Aase beer, but the store where I used to buy it in Racine no longer carries the stuff. Worth it for the name alone. The beer itself is only so-so. ← You do know that Aass is pronounced "orse," right? (At least that's what Garrett Oliver says in the Brewmaster's Table.)

Don't overlook Harold McGee as one of Alton Brown's more significant sources... I think too much has been made of "Good Eats" inaccuracies within this thread. I find that his culinary technique is nearly always reasonable, although we can quibble about this-and-that ("he didn't toast those spices before adding them!", "he didn't truss that chicken!"). As for his scientific explanations, I consider them to be reasonable as well. I'm a practicing chemist and I find his science to be almost always correct. And that's fine with me... In graduate school you learn that everything you learned in high school chemistry was wrong, or at least not nearly as right as you thought. The thing with science is that eventually you have to start laying down equations, often ugly ones, or you're not going to communicate the concept with complete accuracy. Alton can't start talking about reaction mechanisms on Good Eats because he'd alienate >99% of his viewership. So go ahead and nit-pick if you want, but I think that often times you'll fine that he presents an idea in a certain way to make it understandable to the masses even if it's just the "cartoon" explanation to a scientist.

That doesn't make any sense. If anything, pouring slowly would lead to more carbonation in your glass. There's a certain amount of dissolved CO2 in a bottle of beer. When you open that bottle, the CO2 tries to escape to the atmosphere as a direct result of Henry's law. The more the beer is agitated and the warmer it is, the faster the CO2 will escape.

Exactly what I was going to say... I despise milk in my coffee for the same reason that I dislike milk in my chocolate. Dark chocolate tastes of chocolate and, when well made, speaks volumes. Milk chocolate, even when well made, is going to taste muddled because the chocolate has been diluted. Don't get me wrong, though... I LOVE milk (I'm from Wisconsin.). But I don't like it in coffee. But when I serve coffee to others who like milk, I heat some whole milk before adding it to their cup. Takes care of the thermal issue...

The beer market as a whole has been flat since the '80s because there's no room for it to grow. The craft beer sector has been growing within that flat market share. As a result, the big brewing companies are scared to hell because they have no where to go but down. This is also why they are (perhaps) insidiously buying out craft or otherwise independent breweries (i.e. Redhook, Leinenkugels, etc.).

It's possible (I know from experience!) to break the glass with a metal spoon. ← Yes, definitely. I use a chopstick. ← You're kidding me... they don't make french presses out of borosilicate glass (i.e. pyrex)?

I assume that by "Kobe beef" you meant wagyu beef? Unless it's from the Hyogo Prefecture in Japan, I'm sorry but it's not Kobe beef.

That's one of the reasons why I took the job. I need to start cooking outside of my comfort zone, which is the highly rational order of classical French sauces. It's also a good excuse for me to finally really understand the subtleties of dough. We heated our home growing up with a wood furnace, and I always liked cooking hotdogs and making smores in it.

There's a wood fired oven. I'm pretty sure they make the crust using sourdough, and the toppings are all pretty standard european-style pizzas (see the Cheeseboard... the options are very similar). I don't know that much about the restaurant yet, but I know the place has 30 seats in the dining room and 15 more at the bar. Pizza is served as the most popular main course there, as they also do the small plates thing more for apps.

Next week I'm starting work in a new kitchen where they specialize in pizza. Based on my experience working on a traditional line, I'm having trouble understanding how the pizza program fits into the rest of the line. Basically for anyone out there, what should I expect when I walk in the door? What's different in a fine-dining restaurant that serves pizza versus a similar one that doesn't?

Once you get a wort chiller, you'll never want to go back. http://www.northernbrewer.com/wort-chillers.html Just run cold water through it and you get storeable temperatures much, much faster than any other technique I've ever seen. I'm surprised they're as rare as they are in kitchens.