Lisa Shock

I had a couple of fairly lengthy discussions with Albert Adria, and, he said that the restaurant itself doesn't really make money. They survive off the sale of books. IMO, if he needs a break, he needs a break. After spending years living in a van trying to keep the place alive, and then a lot of intense years working hard running it, he deserves a sort of retirement. The toughest part of shorter vacations is knowing that you have to return to work soon. With a longer span of time ahead of him, perhaps he can fully relax and enjoy life a little.

If you are weighing your ingredients, they should scale up or down just fine. Old recipes used to give warnings about cake size to offset some of the errors inherent with volume measurements. I use RLB's chocolate cake (the american style one) from the Cake Bible as cupcakes all the time.

A good grocery store encourages the produce employees to cut open fruit for customers to sample. So, I say don't be shy ask to see one cut open.

Great attention to detail there! I really like how everything coordinates with your packaging. One trick for samples is to save some of your defective items that cannot be recycled into new candy. If you cut the pieces into halves as samples (another trick to stretch the budget) you can often hide/eliminate flaws or just discard a bad half.

I have a relative, who shall remain unnamed, who eats with the salt-shaker in hand. Every single bite, once it is on the fork, gets at least three hard shakes.

Good question! I live in the west and have never seen one. A quick search online finds a lot of wholesalers and commercial producers, but no formulas. My guess would be that they are made with egg and oil, like many challah recipes, so they would be pareve if made in a kosher facility. I can ask around, but won't be at a big baking conference for a few months. If I had one to try, I could probably give a good estimate of a formula. (edited for clarity)

Thank you! I don't have any candy coating, but I do have lots of chocolate - would it be alright to use regular melted chocolate? If you melt the chocolate, you'll probably have to temper it for it to work as glue. -Unless you never let it get hotter than about 85°.

The mexican stuff isn't brown sugar, which I do make by using molasses and sugar. The mexican stuff is more like turbinado, sort of.

Here in Phoenix, the Mexican tan stuff can be gotten fairly cheaply (2 pounds for 79 cents) and it is marked as cane sugar, I am assuming that it's slightly less refined. It does have a slightly 'brown sugar' taste, and I like using it for making simple syrup for cocktails because I feel that it's closer to the sugar that bartenders had available to them in the early 1800's.

You can paint the tart shells with chocolate days in advance. The pudding can be made the day before, but then, so could pastry cream. One easy fruit to use is canned mandarin oranges. The tarts themselves need to remain refrigerated and should be served the same day. Royal icing is the traditional glue for sweets. Instead of mortarboards, you could get rice paper and licorice laces and make tiny rolled diplomas.

They didn't press it at all?

Watch out for 'deals' on equipment. When it breaks, and, eventually it all breaks, there might not be any local service available to repair it. Check on repair service before buying and installing anything. You don't want to be caught with a walk-in full of hot, rotting food for a week while trying to find a repair person. As for a sandwich place, those can be as tough or tougher than a bakery. You're suddenly in competition with everyone from Panera to Taco Bell. All of whom make huge quantities of food in centralized commissaries to distribute to individual locations. They buy their food in such large volume that their retail price is often what your wholesale price, as a small business, will be. And, your customers, especially right now, will be comparing your value for money against those same chains. I know that it isn't fair to compare artisan product to machine-churned out food, but, for a lot of customers paying a couple dollars more than Panera charges for a sandwich won't happen very often.

Yes, and sorry I spelled it wrong! Pâtè fermentèe is a very old, traditional way to add preferment flavor to dough. It's advantage is its simplicity, you just save a chunk of dough from an existing batch, no separate mixing or handling needed. Refrigeration extends its life. There are bakeries that have been doing this continuously for decades.

Looks good! You can always use older dough as patè fermentè in a fresh batch.

The amount of equipment will be determined by the type of bakery and volume you'll be producing. Other things are determined by your local health code, and your county office can help you with a lot of it. (In my county, plans have to be submitted for approval in advance of any renovation or installations. I'd think about that later, after you take some classes and see if you really enjoy the work. (plus, the health code changes every year) Workman's comp laws vary by state, most have laws regulating what types of coverage you are required to purchase. An insurance agent can help you with that. A good school will offer a purchasing class that will help answer some of your questions -and give you skills like calculating cost cards. A being a baker can be one of the most physically demanding food industry jobs. Most commodities come in 50-pound containers, a few come in 100-pound containers. The hours are different from the rest of the world, you roll in at 10 or 11 PM and leave at 10 AM the next morning. -Then grab sleep whenever you can. Most of the work is repetitious and, considered by some to be dull because items for sale need to be uniform in weight and appearance. Filling 10,000 cream puffs one morning isn't everyone's cup of tea. There are a lot of variables that can't be answered until you know exactly what type of bakery you'll be running. Things can be different if you're making a little bread but mostly selling sandwiches and a full meal menu vs. just doing wedding cakes. I'd work in a place for a while and take classes, and save your money and plan along the way. Some areas are really tough for bakeries, high rent & local residents who love the crap at the cheap supermarket bakeries, and it may take a lot of knowledge and marketing to make a go of it. You need to know more about the industry & your area before risking thousands of dollars. For example: I know of a shopping center in my area that would be great for a classic bakery with individual goodies and maybe a soda fountain with ice creams and ices. But, I did the math and discovered that I'd have to sell 2,000+ pastries a day just to meet food costs and pay rent & utilities. And, there's no way that this location would ever draw that many people. Since rents are so high here, most bakeries are wedding driven and located in industrial parks. A cute place to pick up a few cream puffs can't pay the rent. Hope this helps!

Oh yes, they sent it right away. I am a bit disappointed because it isn't the board shown in the pictures and it appears to be very resinated because it's very hard, smooth, and feels cold and kind of artificial. There are several squares where there is clearly filler material around knots. It appears to be THIS board. It's also 2 inches longer in one dimension than my old board, but weighs less. So, I don't really want to spend $12 to return it, and it didn't cost much, so, I am going to keep it to use in photgraphs and as a backup, and look at getting on of David's boards in a few weeks when I am on my feet with my new job that starts next week. I know you are wondering why I bought the checkerboard instead of the plain board you liked, and, in retrospect that's probably what I should have gotten. The reason is that a patterned board, for me, is easier to practice knife cuts on. (I don't need flashy decor in the kitchen.)

Perhaps edible perfumes are what you are looking for?

But, when your hand is in a cast or brace with the thumb pointing away from the palm in a fixed position, holding a knife isn't really possible with any degree of safety. And, if you train yourself to hold the knife in the non-dominate hand, you're still stuck not being able to hold down the item you are cutting, which can lead to chasing hunks of food all over the kitchen.

Commercial nacho cheese contains about 1/3 cream cheese, adding a little to homemade nacho cheese can thicken it a bit and add a smooth texture.

My mother-in-law has arthritis. I got her this jar opener and, it seems to work well for her.

I haven't done many alcohol-containing sorbets, but, for regular ones, I find the key is having the brix between 25% and 30%. You can buy a refractometer on eBay, make certain to get on that is designed for brix and that reads from 0% up to at least 40%. I managed to get one with a dual read out that goes from 0-90 so, I can use it for jam as well. I would also expect that a tonic made with real sugar instead of HFCS would freeze up a bit firmer.

I found this test of beer can chicken vs a can of water.

I got some like that a while back. I was able to run it in my blender for a while and make some powder from it, but, it took time. I recall trying it in the mortar and pestle and it was very difficult to handle.

Thanks guys, I wound up getting a maple/cherry checkerboard end grain cutting board from a local place that is about to stop making wood cutting boards entirely. I will see how it works out, if it doesn't, I'll order one of yours, David.

Agreed. And, I'd like to point out that recipes are often just techniques with fancy names. -At least if you follow the classics as laid out by Careme, Escoffier, etc. Filet de Boeuf Montlhèry is one way to cook a filet of beef and Filet de Boeuf Tallyrand is another. Most of what you have listed as your project are the introductory chapters to any good comprehensive cookbook. If Wiki Cookbooks is missing something you are qualified to write, then I don't see why you don't just go ahead and write it.