mkayahara

I haven't watched the show with any dedication for some time, though I'm still pleased when I happen across an episode. But I must admit I lost some respect for him when he denied the existence of umami as a distinct taste.

Do tell....What is the retrograde starch method? In short, you cook the potatoes at a low temperature (say, 66C) to gelatinize all the starch without letting the granules burst, chill them down to fix the starch, then boil them to break down the cell walls. Then you can puree the potatoes for days in a food processor without them getting gummy. More information here. Edit: Punctuation.

I agree with Darienne: Those pics of the chile aisle are what jealousy is made of. Even our Latin market in Toronto doesn't have that many types of chiles! For mashed potatoes, have you ever tried the retrograde starch method? I think it produces a superior result, though I don't always have the time to do it. Do you ever cook from the Iuzzini book? I've thought about picking that one up, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. It didn't help that my partner didn't much enjoy his dessert at Jean-Georges in December.

Thanks for sharing your cooking week with us, Genkinaonna! I'll be taking my first trip to Portland later this summer - and very excited to do so - so I'll be following along with great interest! I love bubble tea, but my partner can't stand it. We're both looking forward to visiting Powell's, though!

So I harvested a few spruce tips this weekend from the spruce tree in front of my house. Fewer than I might have liked, since I failed to take into account the fact that there aren't very many branches within reach of the ground. After removing the papery bits from their ends, rinsing them, and patting them dry, I put them in a mason jar and made up a brine with cider vinegar (10% salt, 3% sugar), which I poured over the tips while it was still lukewarm. They're sitting in the fridge now, and I'll give them a couple of weeks there. Will report back once I've tasted them.

I've been doing lots of beans in the pressure cooker, too. No calcium chloride for me: there's already so much calcium in my water that beans take forever to get soft at atmospheric pressure. I use the method learned from Ideas in Food: 5 minutes at low pressure in water alone, drain, 25 minutes at high pressure with liquid, seasoning and garnish. Works like a charm every time.

Chris, I think the only place I've ever seen nuka is in a Japanese food store. Edit: I should learn to read before posting.

They're really pretty when raw, but the colours have a tendency to bleed when cooked, in my experience. Edit: Clarification.

Uh... things are on hold for the moment. Hoping to get some time this weekend to harvest some tips, and then I'll play. If I can't get reliable information on pickling them, I'll probably just try a fresh preparation instead. For now, I'm just sitting on a bottle of spruce beer, and wondering whether and how I could use it in a cocktail... Would spruce + gin be overkill?

Richman offers some insight into the filming process.

OK, I know they're considered a delicacy, and their season is now, so how do I go about pickling spruce tips? I have an enormous spruce tree in front of my house, but I'm not sure what variety it is. Do they need to come from a particular type of spruce? What goes into the pickling liquid? Do I pour it over the spruce tips while it's hot, or do I cool it first?

Pretty sure the LCBO only brings in whole-case quantities... but it's a good point: we should get some Ontarians together and see what we can split up a case of. I, for one, would be happy to lay my hands on some Carpano Antica Formula vermouth.

It was complete nonsense that there was even an issue with horse, of course, of course. But I was pleased to learn that the skate used was a sustainable fish, because yes, skate is normally considered unsustainable. (Does anyone remember the name of the fish they used instead? I didn't recognize it.) Normally, seeing an episode like this, I would have gotten annoyed by the network's decision to use an unsustainable fish, but I wouldn't have bothered to contact them to complain or find out exactly which fish was used. As silly as the disclaimer was, it did provide me with information I wouldn't have had otherwise. But on to more serious matters: What do we think of Chris being eliminated? I admit I was a little surprised; I thought either Darryl or Todd would be the one to go. Darryl because his dish showed a lack of basic understanding about seasoning, and Todd because he didn't make his dish to spec, and used store-bought puff pastry. They made a point of decrying Todd's unwillingness to push, and then turned around and eliminated a chef who did push, by trying to make a foie gras torchon when he didn't have enough time. Seems like a mixed message to me.

Is this a hard and fast government regulation, or an airline mandate? Because I do know that SAS (for example) no longer permits anything that is 140 proof or over in carryon bags (passengers were getting too raucous), but you're still permitted to bring it along in your checked luggage. You may want to check a few different airlines, to see whether their policies vary on this point (I do realize SAS and other Northern European carriers aren't exactly the first ones you think of in conjunction with a trip between North America and, say, Jamaica, but it might be worth looking into, anyway). I've always based my understanding of this question on government regulations, which appear to apply to both checked and carry-on luggage. When I bought my two bottles of Lemon Hart 151, I made sure to do so on a trip when I would be driving home.

The episodes are all posted on the Food Network Canada website a couple of days after they air, but they're only available in Canada. Hey, turnabout is fair play.

This question comes up a lot over on the TikiCentral forum, especially around the time Lemon Hart 151 was thought to be discontinued, and the answer is basically that there is no substitute for 151-proof Demerara rum. Worse, even if you go somewhere where it's available, you can't fly it home. In recipes where there's both a 151-proof Demerara and a dark Jamaican, I've been known to sub JWray overproof and aged Demerara, but the flavour isn't going to be the same. I haven't compared them myself, but from what I've read, the next best option for subbing for Lemon Hart would be another brand of dark overproof rum, like Gosling's, rather than Bacardi or JWray. It's especially irksome that we can't get the rum here now that a Canadian company owns the Lemon Hart label.

Thanks so much to Kerry for organizing a fantastic weekend, to the college for hosting us and cooking a wonderful dinner, and to everyone else for coming together and sharing all your knowledge and experience! It was great to see everyone again, and to make some new friends, too. I learned tons, yet again, and had a great time at it. My pate de fruit still needs work, but it's good to know that I wasn't doing anything fundamentally wrong. I have a whole lot of photos to go through, but thought I'd share a couple of initial ones here. First, by Kerry's request, a pic of the bunny she helped me flock: Thanks, Donna, for letting me use that mold. Here's my husband Matt capping off his shell-molded lemon caramels: And here's what they looked like as they were being unmolded:

...illustrating my point about your local market being the main determinant of price. At the LCBO, Doorly's XO is $32.65 a bottle. Evan Williams is not available, and the cheapest Bourbon is Jim Beam White, at $25.95.

A couple of starting points: this thread for general spirits, and this one for Cognac/brandy. (I'm curious: why do you need both?) In general, I think Beefeater, Plymouth and Tanqueray and gold standards for gin, depending on the style you're looking for. Cruzan for St-Croix rum. What kind of dark rum are you looking for? What are you looking to make with it? Of course, price and availability in your local market may vary.

Welcome to eGullet, NoelW! I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "compression". Are you talking about the fact that the foam will collapse if you draw too much of a vacuum? My understanding of the process - though I haven't had a chance to try it out yet - is that you need to be able to stop the vacuum pump when the foam reaches the right expansion. Can your vacuum sealer not do that? I know there are a couple of others here who have done the mango sorbet, with mixed success. Maybe they'll chime in.

I made the Pad Thai from Modernist Cuisine on the weekend. I don't have tons of experience with Thai cuisine, so I'm not really in a position to judge this recipe other than on a basic level. It was certainly delicious! The only ingredient I couldn't find - and couldn't find information about - was the roasted chili powder, so I just took some dried Thai chilis, dry-toasted them in a frying pan, and powdered them. It was tasty. There were several other ingredients I'd never worked with before, including the salted, dried shrimp, and I'm not sure my partner will let me work with those again, given his complaints about how they stank up the house. I think this recipe might be a good candidate for "least modernist recipe in Modernist Cuisine." In fact, you could do it with absolutely no modernist techniques whatsoever. In particular, I found the pressure-cooked peanuts not to be worth the effort that went into them, since they didn't taste noticeably different from regular roasted peanuts. As always, though, I'm willing to accept that user or ingredient error is the problem here.

Hey, that's what I call it, too!

Yummy - did you skin the sausages before rolling? Actually, it was bulk sausage meat I made a froze a while ago, so there were no skins to remove! I just shaped it into flattened logs and then wrapped.

Following DanM's suggestion upthread, I used one sheet of puff pastry on sausage rolls for dinner tonight. Tasty!

How many options have you been asked to/are you thinking of providing? Seems to me that batching would be a boon here. Or just do a couple of punches... I hear they're trendy right now.