Lisa Shock

I have never experienced your problem, but have had insect issues with other foods. The insect you are dealing with may be local to your area. HERE is a helpful document on dealing with various insects that affect curing hams. I would recommend looking at the situation using the HACCP program as a model. You have a fairly good idea of what the hazard you're facing is: bugs. (not that big of a deal to not know the type) You then need to ask how they and/or their eggs are getting into the storage/curing area and how you can stop them. DO NOT USE PESTICIDES. I would start with cleaning and sanitizing the curing room, washing the walls, ceiling, and floor. I would look at how air gets into the room from the outdoors or other rooms. Are there cracks in the walls, or dirty old drains, or air vents in need of cleaning? Can you control the humidity and temperature? I would also look into employee hygiene, are hands being washed frequently, how clean are their shoes, are delivery people kept away from the curing room, are only people with clean uniforms allowed in the room? And then, I would look at every step of the curing process and the path of every ingredient as it enters your establishment. Is your sugar fresh and dry when purchased, is it kept sealed? Is your wrapping paper/cloth clean or does it get handled by too many people, or stored in a questionable area? I know that this is a big project. The solution may be as simple as requiring staff to wear disposable shoe covers when they enter the curing room, or making sure that the sink has been sanitized before starting to rinse off the meat. Good luck!

I think most of these places are serving frozen pre-cooked entrees.

It's been pretty well covered: you won't get much lift from creaming since the sugar is smaller, cornstarch affects tenderness & liquid content, and the recipe will be off balance due to using volume instead weight to measure. Granulated sugar is one of the few dry ingredients to measure out pretty consistently at about 6¾ - 7¼ oz per cup. Powdered sugar, confectioner's sugar, icing sugar, etc. tends to be fluffy and doesn't pack a container in the same way. A cup of it varies widely in weight. If you had made the substitution by weight, I'd say the recipe would turn out close to the original: flatter, denser, but softer with less chew.

I make a side dish that's beurre noisette, some sage sauteed for a minute, pumpkin and salt. Just pumpkin puree as a side for dinner. It can also be piped onto a base as an hors-d'oeuvre.

I'd try to make the glaze more like poured fondant.

Yes, please elaborate on the issues.

I'd check the details on selling the foreign rights, make sure they revert to you so you don't have an issue with releasing a 10th anniversary issue or something in the future.

Vegenaise already exists. I am on the Fed's side on this one. In a world where shelfspace in supermarkets is being taken over by foodstuffs which are at best lame caricatures of classic foods, restricting the nomenclature at least creates a little separation between the real thing and ersatz. I wish they could tighten restrictions so that Kraft 'Macaroni & Cheese' would be called 'dried refined wheat product with dehydrated sauce featuring cheese-like flavoring'.

How much marketing and PR will they realistically do for your book? If they can get more doors open, then it's worth it, IMO. If it's still up to you to do most of the work, I'd self publish.

Aside from uniformity, there's the issue of changing chickens. In 1980, chicken was about 18% fat, now, it's closer to 30%. They get bigger at a much younger age, and are therefore much more tender than in the past. And, the size of the breast relative to the size bird is much larger & thicker. In the past, pounding helped tenderize (which might have been necessary) and was easier to do on smaller, thinner breasts. IMHO, butterflying or just plain horizontal slicing into multiple portions, is fine. I have seen some breasts recently that were incredibly thick, and it seemed like a LOT of pounding (destruction) would be needed to make a classic paillard.

At least with a crowdfunding project like Indiegogo or Kickstarter, you would have a good initial blip when you fulfill the backer orders. The trick there is getting PR for the campaign, usual stuff like sending press releases to local papers, but also trying to get larger outlets to talk about it for its uniqueness. Is there any way to get a pre-production run of maybe 50 copies to mail out to reviewers and maybe some 'hail marys' like The Chew?

McGee covers water baths in detail, and the stirred vs 'still'. There are a lot of variables in cooking custards. You could solve your issue by placing a sheet pan on top while baking, either up or down, whatever works, it would still allow evaporation of the water but would leave the tops undisturbed.

King Cake would be good without icing, it's basically brioche cinnamon swirl bread.

The Japanese make a very lightly sweet white sponge cake topped with whipped cream for Christmas which might work for you. They put strawberries between the layers and on top, you could skip that. I also like Battenburg cake, which is often made in a small size for petit fours sec. (the small, bite sized servings may help you)

I was at an Asian market and saw tofu shaped as rolled up ribbon about 1cm wide and very thin with a scalloped edge, each roll was about 3cm in diameter and there were maybe ten rolls in a pack. Does anyone have an idea how these are usually cooked?

Can you get commercial fruit purees designed for use by chefs? They come frozen, so you can just use what you need and keep the rest frozen. The benefit is that the manufacturer keeps the moisture content consistent. They are also available year-round.

There's always CLR.

Have you tried freeze-dried fruit? If you can get that and crush it to a powder, that adds a lot of natural flavor.

In partial response to Edward J, and some others, I often find myself as an ACF member, in an odd spot. (I am also a culinary school grad and former culinary instructor.) I agree that overall the industry needs a detailed benchmark system. The ACF has one, with weaknesses, but it has one. That said, I have gone through some hoops and passed some benchmarks. Sure, I only have a low level certification, but, I have renewed faithfully, gotten my CE credits, taken the ACF specific university level classes (in sanitation, management, and nutrition), read the magazine, attend events, mentor, etc. It's been really discouraging for me having employers not know anything about the ACF, and not value industry experience. Of course, all of those employers were themselves people with no industry experience. I think a lot of this is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. -Like the Amy's Baking Company episode of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares; civilian owners who actively mock time-tested procedures, methods, formulae, and anyone experienced in them. So many people think they can just open a restaurant without experience, maybe even take it easy in retirement and run a place as a way to relax! I cannot think of another industry where people just assume they could dive in and do well with no training or experience. Those employers with experience, people who worked their way up the ladder, are a rare breed now and often run much smaller kitchens than comparable chefs did in the past. With so many food trucks, and farmer's market stalls and such, a lot of trained chefs now have a couple of employees instead of a brigade. I also think the rise of chains (at all levels) has done away with a lot of opportunity. So many chains just use boil-in-bag food and pre-prepped produce now, they don't train anyone to really cook. It's all checking temps and tearing open bags. So, fewer 'cooks' now perform much simpler tasks. Even places like McDonald's and Burger King have evolved to minimize actual cooking done on site. On the baking side, very few grocery store bakeries actually bake anything. Most just assemble premade cake layers, that ship to the store frozen, with filling you just add water to, and icing that comes in tubs. I was at a pastry chef convention and a Food Network famous cake decorator, when asked for her cake recipe, just shrugged and said she uses cake mixes so she doesn't have to 'worry if it's good or not'. (she makes wedding cakes for Hollywood stars who pay big bucks!) Dunkin Donuts thaws pre-made out doughnuts now, just like Einstein Bros thaws out their bagels -and unbags pre-sliced produce and meats for sandwiches. So, despite there being more restaurants than ever, the actual cooking being done is very, very little. Those who go to school generally come out with a lot of debt and pretty quickly find out that starting out on the bottom means not being able to make their payments. (I had a job a couple years ago where the owner yelled at me every day I worked because he was paying me $10/hour PT and I was the highest paid employee and my 12 hours a week was apparently bankrupting him.) And, yes, most schools should require longer internships, externships, apprenticeships, etc. I know of owners who won't hire students or graduates because of bad experiences, although when pressed, they admit they didn't give a pre-employment market basket or knife skills test either. (when I was in school, there were 'students' who did almost nothing but show up the minimum number of days required and were drunk/stoned all the time -and some who applied themselves and practiced knife skills daily, etc. -you gotta figure out which type of student you're hiring, sadly enough, they all got diplomas) So, I don't have a solution. But, I think for a long time places like the US leaned on imitating systems from places like France. We used to use some of their systems but, we never set up the fundamentals the way they did. So, we don't have professionally educated servers, we're stuck with a weird tipping system, we don't have eleven year old apprentices becoming true master chefs at age 30, and the public at large doesn't respect the work. (if they did, would anyone eat at a place that only serves boil-in-bag food, like Chili's? would anyone watch the American MasterChef show?)

I've always done edge up, seemed like a good way to not have them get dull. But, my current block at home has horizontal slots for the big knives, just the small knives get vertical slots. Twice a year I wash it out completely in the sink.

My mom hates to cook, my dad grilled occasionally. Mom always appreciated help with the housework, (actually, we all had required chores) and sometime when I was 4 she let me cut up salad vegetables while standing on a chair. I liked it. I liked being able to make things and being able to make them to my liking was a big bonus. Within a few months I started cooking some basic dishes like soups and spaghetti sauce. I started reading cookbooks around the same time. -Grownup cookbooks; I didn't start getting kids cookbooks until my dad figured out that I liked cooking a lot and started buying them for me as gifts -even then, I could tell that the regular cookbooks were superior to the kids' books. I recall teaching my younger brother to read by reading a cookbook with him. My first cookbook was La Cuisine de France: The Modern French Cookbook. It was a big adventure for me to read recipes, think about them then decide which ones to choose to make. I got a lot of experience with taste and ingredients at a young age because my mom hated being in the kitchen. I just kept going. I recall making petit fours when I was 9, you couldn't buy tubs of fondant then, I tabled my own. I actually had a baked goods stand at arts and crafts festivals on weekends for a couple of summers - I was 11-13 at the time. I like to try new things and kept reading cookbooks and trying the food.

Here's the Washington Post on the subject. Here in Phoenix, we have had a proliferation of food trucks and small places with owner-operators while at the same time seeing a decline in tourism due to national groups boycotting the state. There are 4 culinary schools in town, and we see a lot of graduates emerge from these schools every year, but the job market here is lagging behind the rest of the nation -we're leading the country in the number of underemployed (people forced to take part time work when they want FT) people. There's also the depressing truth that the Taco Bell near my house pays $11/hour and has some basic benefits, but I know the head pastry chef at one of the few 5-star places in town, he earns $9/hr and gets no benefits.

Oh! I just remembered modelling chocolate. Your 50/50 mix is like modelling chocolate, with honey instead of corn syrup. -I learned to make modelling chocolate by cold mixing tempered chunks of chocolate with corn syrup in a RobotCoupe, but, I see recipes online where the ingredients are heated like ganache making. I still do not think that the OP would get a 'snappy' chocolate bar by mixing 100% cocoa mass with even a small % of honey.

Agreed. A good example of sugar crystals in chocolate is the Mexican chocolate (like Ibarra) which is usually used to make hot chocolate. I have friends who nibble on it, it creeps me out. Overall, this would be a big project. Another, more minor note is that sugar is hygroscopic, so you have to watch the humidity levels in your production facility. Most manufacturers of wholesale chocolate have a variety of products available and some will custom blend -as long as a large enough order is placed.

You could, but not with honey unless you buy a crystallized honey product. Regular honey is about 15% water, which will, of course, cause the chocolate to seize.