inductioncook

Peter, you were probably just kidding about the French white truffle, but in case not: no white truffles from France. But top French truffle merchants have started, and chefs have followed suit, shaving their black truffles raw over dishes, in the Italian white truffle style. And black truffle dishes often have shavings on top as well as small pieces cooked in.

I left the "p" out of "soupconne" earlier -- sorry.

There are a lot of very good French cooking words. A great one is "une larme" -- a teardrop. Another almost infinitesimal one is "une souconne" -- a suspicion. And old, pre-metric cookbooks in Italian have all sorts of colorful expressions. Funny how after centuries of folk terms, colorful expressions and exuberant imprecision, people making pasta in Italy just "happened" on the precision that 100g of pasta is to be cooked in 1000ml of water with 10g of salt!

Another interesting question about this book is -- how many of these recipes are "back formations" from a sous-vide approach at the restaurant? "Butter-poached marble potatoes," for example, seems like a sous-vide recipe that has been transformed into a more conventional recipe. That's not a bad thing -- just interesting -- in Under Pressure there's a description of changing the butter-poached lobster from sous-vide back to an open pan and getting more of the real feeling of cooking, and that feeling is one of the things that is so nice about this book. But there may be others. I wonder if the duck breast recipe was cooked to a fairly low temperature sous-vide and then slowly cooked on the skin side, in effect the reverse of the procedure in Ad Hoc.

I think I'd rather try yours! The duck in the book is cut up lengthwise, isn't it? I don't know why, but it looks strange to my eye. The apple fritters are gorgeous, too. Fritters seem like a fairly straightforward thing - are they Keller'ed up in any way? Apples pureed into the batter or some such? I'm going to Malaysia next month, and I've already had a friend buy a copy to hold on to for me. Amazon isn't shipping until February, so I figure I'll get it faster through that route anyway. I can't wait to get my hands on it. ********************* The lengthwise slices shown in the book are a typical French slicing of duck breast, and fairly thin, but seem kind of at odds with the book's description: "Cut each piece of duck lengthwise in to 3 slices." Is that a home cook simplification they couldn't bear to do for the photograph? (Both pictures look nice).

I don't think you will find a lot of variation. If you look very closely at the bottles you will see that the descriptions are often careful to be precise but are ultimately misleading -- they look like they are made in Italy, or France, and are usually completely synthetic and often synthesized in New Jersey but have very Italian looking bottles. Notice that the discussion above about the Code of Federal Regulations seems to miss the point that the labels DO NOT say "natural truffle flavoring" but avoid the word natural because they are artificial. (Also many small production flavorings are not always in compliance with labeling laws). If you're familiar with truffles, white or black (Perigord or Burgundy/summer/winter), your first experience with truffle oil is likely to be amazement that there could be so much truffle flavor for so little money. However, as with many synthetic products (vanillin, for example), after you've used it a few times you may begin to have a sense that you are dealing with a one-dimensional flavor that is not really comparable to the real thing. In short, most if not all "truffle oil" - even from reputable truffle merchants - contains no truffle. The points above about the ubiquity of truffle oil crowding out appreciation for the real thing are well taken -- look what has happened to Balsamic vinegar, where people who call it "Balsamic" may scorn or waste the real thing if they encounter it.

That's a very interesting set of numbers because I had also found a range of 65-70C to be good in my cooking, and then when I was having lunch recently at a lobster pound in Maine I took the temperature of the steaming lobster I was served -- and the lovely tender nicely cooked claw was 66C and the tail, which I felt was slightly overcooked was 72C, just above the range mentioned.

Is there a reason you are "holding" at a higher temperature than you are cooking to? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of cooking precisely to 130F in the first place?