Kerry Beal

You guys could join us at the heartland gathering and bring along all your coffee stuff for the Saturday dinner (and the Sunday brunch)!

I know Andi talks about Smart and Final - appears they have some Texas stores - so worth a phone call.

I think they will likely stick together just fine.

This the one?

Almost looks intentional.

If shipping is any cheaper from Vancouver to Alaska - I know that Snowcap carries it there.

Also, the more uneducated the viewer, the easier it is to convince them some $15 plastic doohickey and a $5000 gourmet stove is all that stands between them and gourmet chef status. Educated cooks are harder to sell to. Yup - we educated cooks buy the $15 plastic doohickey for 50¢ at a thrift store so we can entertain our eG friends - behold the Eggstractor.

Old joke - "did you hear about the couple that were married so long - they were on their second bottle of tabasco sauce?"

Powder - try Chef Rubber. http://www.shopchefrubber.com/Pectin-Pate-de-Fruit-500g-1.1-lbs/

I don't use the liquid pectin - I use apple pectin - so not sure about that one. Here we go - the PDF of the PDF's. pates_de_fruits 18-22-28.pdf

They will probably be pretty sweet - but likely white would be the thing to try. Will PM the old ones when I get home after 4. Although I'm going to look back in this thread and see if we have attached them here - cause I thought with the second to last upgrade we were able to add PDF files.

I suspect this is going to be one of those things you'll need to experiment with to figure out what you like the best. Rhubarb flavour comes through nicely in a PDF, but the chocolate in the strawberry ganache might disguise both fruit flavours somewhat.

I don't think that's actually necessary, as long as there is enough sugar to reach the desired concentration for the total amount of liquid (initial syrup and nuts). It should be similar to equilibrium brining. However, packing the nuts into jars will probably leave too little space for the syrup. Probably better to pack everything in a bag and fill the glass jars after the candying is done. The question is, what should be the final sugar concentration in the nuts? Most candied fruit are around 65 Brix.

I think you are going to have to place them in increasingly concentrated sucrose solutions. So you can pack the nuts the first time with the initial sucrose solution, sous vide, then drain and concentrate the syrup, repack, sous vide again, drain, concentrate, repack. Or simply make a few different solutions to start. Don't know if you gain anything this way over just boiling the three times. I get laughed at when I try to sous vide everything...I think the exactly words used have been "when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail"! But - here is a link to a neat article on vacuum candying/drying of fruit that caught my fancy and someday will be tried.

Was talking to the medical student who was working with me today in the clinic and mentioned that I was making the Momofuku pork buns for dinner. Her response - she'd always wanted to go to Momofuku and had made it to Milk Bar last time she was in NYC. Realized she would be welcome to join me for dinner!

Mint Julep (Genever) from Kindred Cocktail.

Four actually!!!!

Strawberry Rhubarb PDF. I realized when I went digging through my stuff that I had brought a big bag of the evil apple pectin - the kind that is for jam, not PDF - so this caused a big of a crisis. I did however have some Pectin NH and some Pectin X58. A little research led me to believe they might work - so I used a 50/50 mix of the two of them in an amount equal to the apple pectin called for in the recipe. I wasn't sure that it was going well (cause one of the recipes called for stopping at 102ºC and I was heading for 107ºC) the entire cooking time. But they turned out perfectly - and they are pretty darn yummy!

Nigella Lawson's Rhubarb Polenta Cake with the addition of some strawberries to make up for the lack of rhubarb and a goodly amount of powdered ginger. There is another recipe online that uses crystallized ginger in this cake - and unfortunately I don't have any with me right now.

I too like the seed method - if I'm starting with chocolate that is clearly in temper I simply half melt it and let the residual heat bring it down to the working temperature as the seed melts. If it's in poor temper (and I have some seed that is in good temper) then I'll heat to somewhere between 45 and 50, add the seed a bit at a time until I get down to the working temperature.

Oh dear - I think we might get away with it! Dark chocolate you should be able to over shoot to 33 and get away with it. I usually wait a bit after I'm convinced I have good temper to let crystals grow - but the fact that it cooled so much and you had to reheat so many times makes me wonder if perhaps you had over crystallized chocolate. Did you put the dipped chocolates in the fridge to carry off the latent heat while they were cooling?

I certainly don't stir constantly - I come back to it every few minutes and give it a little stir as it cools. What temperatures were you using to temper? Did you do a test on the chocolate before you started dipping?

Excuse the poor picture - was feeding the rugrat so didn't want to take the time to set up a picture in the other room. "Improved Gin Cocktail" - lovely albeit a bit booze forward.

Yup - it is.

A batch of mint meltaways for work today.