Lisa Shock

Sugar will have the brilliance of color, and, clarity as pictured.

Even when dealing with one manufacturer, there are often a dozen or more types produced. Many make chips designed for cookies, baking bars, and several grades of couveture per type of chocolate. Every one of these will have a different split.

You could freeze them. You could freeze in small ice cube trays, like herbs, for small portions.

Yeah, because every manufacturer offers products whose solids/fat ratio is completely different.

It's going to vary by type/manufacturer, more specifically by the split.

You can mold sugar in silicon molds, I have one designed to make beads. They could also be hand-rolled, it's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. So, essentially, I think they are hard candy.

I believe it's Sertir, here's an example of it in use: http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-Pinces-Sertir-Pate-Sucre-Pate-dAmande-Patisserie-etc-/120895567247?pt=FR_YO_MaisonJardin_Cuisine_UstensilesdeCuisine&hash=item1c25eff58f

If you can you should check out the BBC series Manor House it was a reality show where they took people and made them live in a large estate as if it were the early 1900's. The cook had to make all these foods with period equipment. Also, the family playing the part of the estate owners often protested the foods and kept trying to cheat. There were also some earlier BBC series' only available in the UK called The Victorian Garden, The Victorian Kitchen, etc. where people re-enacted life in late Victorian times. By today's standards, the show is a bit slow and pedantic. I discovered the book, The Victorian Kitchen by Jennifer Davies and found it fascinating. I have a region-free DVD player, so I picked up the DVD set as well.

5-10 minutes is a really long pre-heat. It sounds like you're getting the pan too hot, especially if the meat is coming out tough. Try taking the temperature of the inside of the pan with an infrared thermometer and see what the temperature is and adjust from there. Garlic does burn pretty quickly, and lose its flavor quickly even if not burnt, which is why I like to add it partway through stir-frying not at the start. The oil is the main clue here, if that's really smoking, the pan is too hot.

I'd try asking other chefs, especially those whose restaurants advertise that the offer locally produced foods. See if you can attend a local ACF meeting and ask the chefs there, someone is bound to know. If there's a culinary school nearby, try attending an open house and asking there. -Schools like to have extracurricular activities that involve local farmers, and they may also have required students to write a paper on local foods, requiring students to get out and find these growers.

Bourbon in American-style baked beans is fairly common. Other than that, I only have some vague recollections of white wine in some dish I have forgotten -catch is wine is acidic and should interfere with cooking the beans.

Crepes, and then assorted things to fill the crepes.... One of the weirder things I know about is that some places make grilled cheese sandwiches by placing two pieces of bread on the griddle and the cheese (in a well oiled spot) -you have to be fast, but you can pick up the cheese with a spatula then place it on one of the bread slices and top with the other. It speeds things up immensely. (traditional grilled cheese takes a long time, and this is why it's never taken off as fast food -except at Sonic, where an employee showed me this trick) You can make all sorts of creative grilled cheese combinations.One place I know of makes tuna melts this way, too.

What about a chunky salad of crunchy vegetables with a dressing based on flavoring some veganaise? (so it's lower in acid than a vinaigrette)

Yeah, that's what I am thinking. I'll probably get around to baking something tomorrow night and see.

Has anyone ever lined their pan with med-fine pearl sugar? I am thinking about making a brioche that I want to turn out of a mold and would like some decoration on it. I was wondering if the pearl sugar would survive as white bits, or would caramelize? I am thinking of spraying the pan then tossing some pearl sugar in, and then adding the dough.

I have always found choux to be useful for catering because one can make savory items as well as sweets with it. Obviously there are gougere, but, you can do a lot by rethinking the fat in the dough. Bacon fat, duck fat, chicken fat, brown butter, and more can be used, as well as small amounts of flavor such as smoke or herbs. Then, fillings can be all sorts of savory mousses, bound salads, dips, etc.

Tea, I don't like coffee. That said, I do like to indulge the occasional cup of chocolate in cold weather....

I found some clips: http://www.fujitv.co.jp/doga/index.html#Y/v6R1lZX58tg/PLh4aJSJaObrbAvLIyZGSOJ7LDjHxlICLL/612000005

I've taught from several books, and I prefer Professional Baking. The CIA book has some good things, but, it's missing some fundamental basic topics and formulas. (There's no white bread, no plain tuile, etc.) When I taught with it, I had to create my own supplemental booklet to give students basic formulas for many standard items. Professional Baking is a better foundation book.

Good point about the oven, in some countries regular houses and apartments simply don't have them.

As for a food processor, I have never owned one. But, please remember that I have good knife skills and can cut things very quickly. (I have been the knife skills point person on competition teams) Generally, my thinking is that it's faster for me to cut things by hand, and there's less cleanup. I think the only time I have regretted not having one was when I was trying to make a confection that called for grinding down several pounds of dried apricots. I do own a blender and a hand blender. And, I own several mortars and pestles, one I just use wet. In a pinch, I could just get by with the hand blender alone, I think. Given sparse resources, I'd take the immersion blender -in the country's chosen electrical standard.

I managed to live for a couple of years with a wok, multi-tiered bamboo steamer, a 3 qt. pot with lid, and a 9x13 baking dish. If you don't have a oven, the baking dish could go. Essentially, I used the 3qt pot for anything involving boiling water: rice, pasta, soup, stew, etc. Fresh veg got cooked in the steamer, and, I'd even make sauces in a small ceramic bowl placed in the steamer. Admittedly, I was going through a phase of studying Chinese food, and, was sharing a house/kitchen with 3 other women, so I often had to make my dinner on 1 burner. Sometimes, only the oven was available to me, so I roasted a lot of foods. I eventually added a cast iron frying pan just to have a flat bottomed pan to make pancakes with. I guess the trick is to ask yourself what sorts of meals do you make most often, and what pans would you need to do that? I think everyone will have a different answer to this.

That would be the intelligent way to approach it if the recipe is the only goal but I'm actually interested in the process of trying to figure it out. I can look at a list of ingredients for a food dish and feel pretty confident about putting it together, even without measures disclosed, and ending up in the general vicinity of what was intended. I was just curious if there's a way of approaching that with drinks, where often the smallest of changes make a big difference. Maybe it's a tough call to get the same drink without more information but it looks like there are ways to narrow it down to a few likely suspects if you have sufficient knowledge of the craft. Experience, and maybe even instinct, probably helps narrow it down even further. I'm guessing that Chris and Stephen are at least within a hair of the actual recipes and wouldn't be surprised at all if any of them turned out to be spot on. Seeing how they thought about it to get those results is exacty what I'm after. So, even if this thread dies (which I hope it doesn't), I've already learned from it. My intention was simply to point out that passionate people in the food industry are also generally nice people who are willing to help out fellow foodies. I wasn't trying to kill the creativity, sorry, carry on.

Honestly, I'd try emailing them and simply asking. I've gotten a lot of formulas this way.

At least where the Cheesecake Factory is concerned, they assume that you're taking a lot of the meal home to eat on another day. I recall reading an article about their menu strategy and they said they knew that one of their strong points was that women would eat there because they knew that the next day's lunch would be taken care of with leftovers, and they viewed it as very economical.