Steve Klc

You'd be better off buying and using almond flour Elie, that's what most pastry chefs use for macarons. If you try to grind nuts yourself--sometimes freezing the nuts first and then pulsing them in the cuisinart or robo-coupe helps, sometimes lightly toasting the nuts first helps, sometimes mixing some sugar in with the nuts and then grinding helps--it depends. I freeze and grind Sicilian pistachios into a fine bright green powder and buy almond flour (the kind that has had some of the almond oil pressed out of it.) There's no way to save time, i.e. eliminate sifting, when you try to grind yourself. You'll still get larger pieces and you'll still overheat the nuts if you grind with too heavy a hand.

This is a few years old, right? I've looked at it, it's basic, fairly accessible for a home cook without much experience, but most of it has already been done or covered better elsewhere.

Sounds like this place has some momentum behind it: http://washington.bizjournals.com/washingt.../12/story5.html Nicely-written article.

Thank you for taking one for the team--especially the team without children. We'll try to repay you. How crowded was it, and what day/time were you there? Any of your kids in a high chair and how well was that handled from a service perspective?

But you just know what's more likely to happen is even more chains and franchises displace them.

Some astute observations on this thread which echo my feelings--that chains in and of themselves aren't negative, I've had many a good meal worth returning for at chains or franchises--the latest of which was a super experience at Big Bowl in Clarendon; rather, it's the lack of other options in an area--options for more personal more individual cooking--that I decry; independent restaurants are not inherently better because they are independent--chains, franchises and independents can underwhelm and disappoint equally. Case in point: how often has anyone on this forum had a wonderful meal at an Il Radicchio? Some concepts "franchise" or export well--they had smart people making decisions, have good consultants, good teachers and training in the kitchen, attainable, retainable goals and quality control, they know their own limits and work within their limits, managers are invested and care beyond the paycheck, etc. Take Jaleo for example--I wouldn't worry in the slightest about Jose opening a third location in Crystal City in September because the same smart people behind the first Jaleo are behind this one--and Rudolfo Guzman, who has run the downtown Jaleo kitchen for years will train and oversee the Crystal City team--which means you'll still get personal, individual cooking and seasonal tapas which stretch the limits of that price point like no other restaurant. That's because Jose has that talent to motivate--and he has retained kitchen talent like Rudolfo who he's been developing for years. The basque cake and leche merengada ice cream or the arroz con leche a new way I created for downtown Jaleo will be just as good at Crystal City. And I think that's the biggest difference between chains and franchises which are spun off and independent restaurant groups or "stables" which expand--it's much easier to spin off a concept (and see it almost invariably decline over time) than it is to retain ownership of it and ensure long-term oversight and quality control. But, make no mistake, in order to do that volume and retain that level of consistency, profitability and interest, there better be a formula--to the business and to the food. The difference is some people are better at coming up with formulas and systems than others.

Yes, Raji Jallepalli was very influential driving this movement on the NYC scene, tweaked, she was behind Surya and then Tamarind. Her career and influence was often discussed on eG--and it had a DC connection, Jean-Louis Palladin took an early interest in her. (I think she was nominated a few times but never won Beard Best Chef in her region--the Southeast region is very tough to come out of, it includes New Orleans, Florida, Atlanta, Charleston, Louisville, North Carolina chefs like the Barkers, etc.)

Which is why how many of us who don't live anywhere near there made the effort to go out to that relative Silver Spring wasteland of congestion and wasted opportunities to show support for Red Dog Cafe? Like Don, we're suckers for that glimmer of light at the end of a tunnel because if we don't pay attention to the glimmer, well, you know what happens next, a Panera opens in the space after the small independent glimmer fails to connect with its audience.

I think what akwa might be after is this--one of the things that makes Herve This significant is he recognizes the vital importance of the "food" scientist or true chemist partnering with the elite professional chef or pastry chef--and pursuing projects jointly, as a team. That's a synergy, if you will, and it reinforces the notion that science is integrally linked to cooking--always has been and always will be. The US model to date has been to present the food scientist as the more enlightened cooking authority--think home cook merged with college science text--with little regard for the role the professional chef or professional pastry chef plays in the development process. So, in one sense, akwa might simply be requesting a professional collaboration--in the manner Herve This collaborates with a Conticini or Gagnaire in France or Blumenthal with Barham in the UK. If I were a chemist, I'd play akwa. Good luck, I'd like to see more of that synergy happen.

I remember the anticipation of eating at Austin Grill when it first opened, I had been living in Glover Park since 1983 and then one great place after another seemed to open up in the neighborhood (Boston Market excepted.) Very flavorful food at Austin Grill in a fun setting which quickly became chic and then spun off as a replicable concept. But before that, and for a brief moment in time, a time far far away, the Glover Park Austin Grill really rocked. None of the Mex/Tex/SW/New-Mex places since have ever come to close to its quality and level of interest. Don--you're embarrassed by that menu because it defines dining for our area for far too many people. The embrarrassment you feel is collective and powerless--that despite the effort of a hundred DonRocks, were they to rise up--the bland, homogenous and commercial has already achieved critical mass. Convenience long ago suspended disbelief.

NYC had restaurants with French-influenced Indian cooking a decade ago, Pondicherry and later Surya made waves, but were much more traditionally Indian than they were successfully fused with French. You started to see more of the "French" aspects mostly in the front of the house in terms of service and plating. Danny Meyer realized the upward arc of a hot trend possibility and Tabla opened in what, 1998-99? At least 4 other attempts at modern, creative Western-leaning Indian-driven restaurants in NYC opened afterward, with some very talented chefs exploring various degrees of "fusion," Mantra emulated this and opened in Boston in 2001. It's still an open debate how successful this "fusion" has been. But this has been a trend for ages--Michael Batterberry devoted the cover story of his January 1999 issue of Food Arts to it once Tabla finally opened--it's just too typical of DC that it took this long to reach here and that most of the initial legwork and creativity in this sub-genre took place elsewhere. It will be worth keeping an eye on IndeBleu--and on whatever the Heritage India ex-partner of Sudhir Seth tries to fuse as well--because it is much much easier to do "Indian fusion" poorly, than well.

I'm with you morela, I've lived 3 blocks away from Cafe Asia for years and if you notice I never mention it in my top neighborhood picks. Out of deference to Mark and his owner friend, on the last thread we had on eG about Cafe Asia, I keep hoping my previous experiences were exceptions to the rule--and just state that I have not been back since. Yet restaurants improve, it always seems crowded when I go by and the patio is often packed. (I've never had a disappointing experience at Spices, I think it hits what it aims for, including the sushi, and would return readily.)

No she wouldn't--because she would have been the one to make the decision to start selling them from her house in the first place. You don't want to risk being interrupted once in a while when you're having dinner? Then don't start selling cheese out of your house just because it is convenient to sometimes. In this Rucker goat cheese example, of which I'm completely in the dark, business decisions were made that likely led to later frustrations--other avenues were always open for distribution, for sales, her cheese could have been sold solely to restaurants, solely to markets or to Wegmans, at farmer's markets, via the web, fed-ex'd nationwide instead--please, I'm sorry to see someone, anyone, passionate about what they did decide to pull the plug--but it's just as likely some inexperience, misjudgement, or miscalculations along the way, that had nothing to do with the cheese, led to this, don't you think? Someone made the decision to sell the cheese from their home in the first place--and that wasn't the "city folk." At some point in a retail customer service business you accept the rude city folk and the self-important clients because they help you make a living and the onus is on you to figure out a business plan: you figure out how to deal with them on your terms--you target different clients or change those terms--or you get out of the customer service business. If the demand was there, and still is there, perhaps it is not too late to change the terms of that farmer-client relationship. I go out to Linden Vineyards every now and then and am amazed Jim Law lives there--what a beautiful property so I wasn't surprised, but he closes at a certain time, 5 PM I believe, and then that becomes his time. He refuses to rent out his winery for weddings and special events just to protect his time. He likely keeps rude city folk off his grounds after 5 PM by...closing his gate...so no one can drive or walk up his driveway to interrupt him. But without the rude city folk buying his wines and partaking of his tours and tasting room generosity before 5PM, without the Muffys pulling up in their Mini Cooper or Mazda Miata clamoring for his product he wouldn't stay in business. He found a way to make the farm/business/personal co-exist, I'm sorry Heidi didn't but please don't lay the blame where it doesn't belong.

Well, I wouldn't swing this too far to the other side--but what this says more than anything else is we often don't get to define the kinds of jobs we have, the salary and pay structure, and the jobs we want to do aren't going to be there as often as we'd like them to be, etc--that instead of making $9 an hour right out of pastry school in a restaurant, you might be working in a foodservice situation somewhere cranking out wholesale desserts on a line not too different than an auto assembly line--and just like in those plants you can be slotted and specialized or you can hopefully multitask and learn different stations (different parts like windshields or doors) and move forward. I don't think it's necessarily better or worse in a restaurant or a centralized wholesale Walmart type operation: both operations hire less-formally trained people and inexperienced people with good attitudes and no skills--employment benefits will likely be better at a WalMart-type operation than in an individual restaurant. I'm still waiting for the professional pastry school backlash to hit (and I hope it never does) when too many of these graduates seduced by the magazines realize they could have gotten these very same jobs without going to school and into debt--and that their prospects aren't necessarily any brighter because they went to school. And if we get handfuls of entry-level program-seeking students to stop and reflect--and then make a more informed decision--we'd have gained. Because that's one thing they won't be hearing about from the magazine or from the schools themselves. I don't blame chefs, like the guy who wrote this column in PA&D, for pursuing an opportunity to get something reliable, consistent and fairly decent if not exactly personal. Michael Schneider and Mark Kammerer (a very smart and creative guy by the way) are actually doing every pastry chef in the country a favor by running this column. Foodservice guys are like that--and this chef knows, frankly, there's not that much difference in quality between some of these preprepared/frozen things and what an under-trained, over-worked pastry chef would provide--and if he outsourced for relatively the same quality he'd save in other areas and could cut salary, staffing, benefits, absenteeism, overhead, etc. Fact is, this is a big segment of the audience--the chefs control the pursestrings--the manufacturer money is there for advertising and promotion--as it has been with a company like Chocolates a la Carte who has spent big time to co-opt some of the better pastry chefs in this country and also insulate themselves with advertising dollars into magazines like PA&D and Food Arts and competitions like the Vegas CaryMax event. All we can do is pick up our skill level, move forward, keep calling attention to it, raising awareness with the public and look to support more personal, more individual work--in cooking and in pastry.

Won't happen--this has been going on for some time now and you'll see increasing advertorial and editorial coverage of that because the advertising dollars are there--you telling me Albert Uster shouldn't promote IcEscape in PA&D? The reality is this is a big growth area--enabling more chefs to do without pastry chefs, more hotels to fire their higher-paid more experienced pastry chefs and replace them, even more inexperienced people will take jobs sooner than they would otherwise, staff jobs will be cut. There have been some very well-known pastry chefs--competitors in the US National Pastry Championships--who have had jobs where mostly what they did day to day was use these products and send them out the door to banquets and breakfast buffets. This already is a reality all these professional pastry school graduates have to face. That just makes what we say on eG all that more relevant so you can react to it head-on--you accept it and ignore it at your future peril otherwise.

Oh my God, Josh--you haven't had showpieces destroyed by the public or by diners? I think if you've done your job creating an inviting display you draw people in because they're fascinated by this stuff--they have no clue about it but they are fascinated by it. People think nothing of touching, grabbing, breaking, pinching, poking, you name it, they do it--you need ropes and stantions and guards to keep people away. One year after we finished the US Pastry team Championship thing, it was in Beaver Creek out under the hot tent and we were dead tired, had to go change and then hike somewhere for the announcement (not in a nice crowd controlled temperature controlled environment like it is now in Vegas) so we go back to our condos, change, come back later to find all of our showpieces just sitting out, unguarded in an empty tent with this wild pack of little kids running around trashing them all, breaking them, eating them, etc--and the event photographer hadn't even gotten good pictures of them yet because he headed up to the award announcement! No, there is a primal attraction to these things and it extends beyond culture, age, etc--it's like we're all coded from previous generations and have some inherent attraction to these pieces montees built-in since the Middle Ages. It's interesting, I've observed the opposite reaction to one particular buffet item showpiece--the croquembouche--most people stay completely away from it--they're completely stunned, they think they know what it is but they're not sure what to do with it--and then usually some little old French lady comes along and says brusquely "this is what you do" as she grabs a pastry cream-filled caramelized choux section and rips them right off, knocks a little piece of nougatine off and then it is a free for all. No, if you do a buffet you have to have a whole strategy in your design about how you're going to keep people from reaching and destroying your beautiful pastillage or sugar piece--for putting their big fat warm thumbprint on your chocolate sculpture, from pulling off and licking your pulled sugar rose--for how would you recycle or re-use it later at the next buffet if they broke it!--or just don't do a traditional showpiece like that, design one MEANT to be eaten in the first place! An interactive buffet. (One year for the NY Chocolate Show I partnered with an architect and restaurant designer, the fantastic Warren Ashworth, to create this little loop de loop building in chocolate which we designed that little kids could drop a molded chocolate ball in the top and it would roll all the way down and around and out a chute. It wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes if not roped off because what is modelling chocolate if not a slightly more sophisticated tootsie roll?) ShaRae--do you make any attempt to present things at different heights--to stagger some low, some on stands, etc? Jason--what kind of presentation strategies did you emply to keep the brulees and sabayon cold on the buffet?

Did you temper and dip with it or just dip into untempered? Also, would you mind listing the ingredients in order for us and telling us what you paid? Thanks andiesenji! The plot thickens...

But that's also why there's value in sharing experiences here in a community--why your presence is vital--because we can get the word out as things change in ways previous generations did not, we can share perspectives, history, developments, and someone at home, who has that expensive supposedly boutique bar of 100% venezuelan El Rey which they paid a pretty penny for--say $12.99 a pound in a retail store--they try to melt or temper it and bingo--they have muck. They come here and they'll find out it is not them! They have done everything right! It's the chocolate and the formulation--then the light bulb goes off and they can move on. Even though El Rey has reformulated it it still is better for other things or better in a blend with other couvertures for things like molding or enrobing. And while I am an advocate for quality I'm also not a blind advocate--I have to see it in performance and I push less expensive couvertures like E. Guittard and Cacao Noel (and even a non-couverture if I found one) as long as they work, they perform. And when they get past the very beginning stages--and have dived in and tempered and move on to trying to mold--and their chocolates (dark, white or milk) are to thick to do anything with even if they raise the temp a few degrees, or if they're too cool, too over-stirred, too over-activated "but still in temper" even though its outside the range--they can find others who will commiserate with them and help show them the way forward. It's at that point that the broad parameters can let them down--chocolate and couvertures are very resilient animals but often once you get someone to a critical mass very specific answers are needed to solve very narrow issues and/or it takes a perfectionist to solve some broader complexity. Simon--see what you have down the road if you keep aiming high? I think the boutique aspect shouldn't even enter into the discussion here--we're agreed on that distracts beginners and how that's overblown and misunderstood anyway! Let's discuss the high end taste points in another thread sometime. Here we're just thinking entry level, working with chocolate, trying to come to grips with ganache and then basic tempering like sgfrank proposes--as you cover in your books, as any of us who work with chocolate or create with chocolate daily do, and as those of us who also teach do--just getting beginners to think about something like viscosity and couverture is a good thing because then they realize all chocolate isn't equal--and that gets them thinking while they do, while they experiment and eventually it gets them back to cocoa butter, how different chocolates are formulated, etc. (I admit I usually try to get people ahead fairly quickly, even home cooks.) Thank you for filling us in on Peters Burgundy--I remember you had it at the NY Chocolate Show a few years ago--but it isn't something I ever melted and used though I have tasted it, my baseline when I was in school was Cacao Barry Favorites mi amere and I never went lower than that since. I'll get my hands on Peters Burgundy at some point soon and report back--you perked my interest! And hopefully Simon will weigh in with a report on this particular Lindt adventure of his.

True, Elaine, but don't you think it is much more difficult for a beginner (like an sgfrank) to temper white or milk--the working ranges are narrower and the temperatures lower? And aren't you much more likely to have success--and achieve workability--with milks and whites if they are couvertures rather than just non-couvertures? In sgfrank's case he is talking about a dark--and I dark I've only eaten but not used--and it may be his Lindt works out just fine--I hope so. With darks, though, I'm curious which chocolates you can recommend--that temper reliably and perform fluidly and well--with sugar listed as the first ingredient? I haven't come across one but I also haven't worked my way through the entire low end of the market. And with the internet and supermarkets realizing there's a market for better chocolates, the couvertures and the chocolates the pros use--even home bakers don't have to settle for poor chocolate anymore--walk into a decent gourmet supermarket, a Wegmans, a Whole Foods, a Central Market or Draegers--even a Trader Joe's--let alone a Fox & Obel where you've taught-- and you'll find an array of Valrhona couverture, Sharffen Berger couverture, and other couvertures even sold chopped bulk retail now--Sur La Table has big boxes of Cluizel couverture and blocks of E. Guittard couverture which melt and temper like a dream, corner markets in decent sized cities have several couvertures to choose from now. That's because even the home baker has started to realize they don't have to settle anymore for the too-sweet, too-thick, too-difficult to melt stuff. It isn't just chips that don't melt--certain varieties of even "professional" couvertures like El rey and Callebaut might theoretically be temperable--but once you get them tempered you can't do much with them--because of their viscosity. A beginner raises the temperature a little bit and bang--out of temper. So that's a roundabout way of saying that's a message I hope gets out more--because then the lower end manufacturers will be forced to improve their products as well. That will result in more people tempering successfully, more people actually being able to do something thin and clean with their chocolate once they temper it, and fewer people giving up in frustration.

I think by definition any chocolate that has cocoa butter in it can be tempered--I even tempered Hershey's once. But part of the reason so many people have problems tempering is because they're not actually using a good enough chocolate--a couverture--they're using other less expensive chocolates not really designed to be tempered, which don't have enough cocoa butter and aren't fluid. I think the most important question with the chocolate you're planning to use to coat your truffles is--is it a good enough one to try to temper for this task (coating truffles). I'm not familiar with Lindt, but if it is a couverture, if it's first ingredient is not sugar, then it likely has the sufficient cocoa butter and is fluid (rather than thick) and you'll have a better chance. I'd do a test--just try melting the Lindt--see how that goes--if it melts easily you can move on to tempering--if not, you can use the Lindt for ganache and seek out a better chocolate for dipping. Whether you decide to temper and coat, or not, is up to you. But, this is from Bon Appetit--and to most of us here it's too dumbed down even for the home cook--it calls for you to dip your truffle into 115 degree UN-tempered chocolate--as if you couldn't temper or wouldn't try tempering. As McDuff says--tempering chocolate is easier than you think. If you follow Bon Appetit's instructions and just coat with un-tempered chocolate, any chocolate, you'll get this dull semi-hard, semi-soft, melt the minute you take it out of the fridge and handle it mess. That's the advantage of coating your truffle in tempered chocolate--it will hold up at room temp and give you a nice snap when you bite into it--and using a couverture for this will help immensely, at least in my experience couvertures are much more easily tempered than non-couvertures.

Well said, Ted. More pictures please (though only as long as it doesn't interfere with your work!)

You can achieve a lot of diversity with the good ol' American brownie. I fall solidly on the very dark, fudgy, chewy, moist, dense brownie side of the fence when eaten solo, so I'm afriad I can't be much help to the light, cakey brownie style seekers or with the milk chocolate angle. Good luck, however--you might try boosting the too-sweet, cacao-lacking Callebaut milk chocolate brownie batches with cocoa powder in the recipe. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?p...7&notFound=true This nice Washington Post article has four recipes tacked on at the end representing the different brownie styles and effects. "Many" brownie recipes are variations of these Fannie Farmer classics. Philippe Conticini does a very interesting brownie (which ran in his NYTimes series) but I don't think we ever posted it on eG. Anyone remember?

And let's put an end to end to any sense that having conversion tables in the back of the book is an adequate compromise or middle ground on this weight versus volume issue. That's just more laziness on the part of the dumbed-down cookbook cabal.

That's a good idea--in that recent Judith Weinraub article, he said "I take something people feel comfortable with and, still respecting the original ingredients, use modern techniques and presentation to bring the dish up to a new level," says Trabocchi. "Better and more interesting -- and extremely dramatic." Judith wrote "Trabocchi's food is grounded in Italian regional cuisine, but for many diners not recognizably so. The ingredients may be similar. Some of the reference points -- pasta, the carpaccio, risotto -- are, too. But his aspirations are quite different" and "Consider, for example, his lobster ravioli. The concept is classically Italian, but the contemporary ingredients include lobster from Maine and an Asian ginger and lemon glaze. The technique also is contemporary. There's a chunk of raw lobster inside the ravioli dough (instead of a mousse or blend of lobster meat), so that both are cooked together in simmering fish stock." Link to more Weinraub on Fabio here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...3-2004May4.html

Since you brought it up--has any eGulleteer been to this Cheesecake Factory yet and willing to admit it? (It's right in between Harry's Tap Room and Boulevard Wood Grill for anyone not local.)