mkayahara

Yeah, re- re- rereading the recipe, I really screwed up the ratio of cheese to pasta quite badly. I might give this another shot today and see if I can make it work better. To be fair, it looks like a very small serving size overall, though possibly very rich. Did you find that it was enough for dinner, or was it just an appetizer?

Thanks for sharing this, Chris. It does look really cool, but I, too, thought it seemed like a lot of cheese for a small amount of pasta. Plus, yeah, cream. Still, it's a fun idea, and that sauce will likely solve a problem I've been having with a dish I've been mulling over in my head.

Looking forward to the pics of this one: the image in the book makes it look far more conceptual than tasty. I'll be curious to hear your report.

Just came across the recipe for spiced honey glass in Modernist Cuisine, and the margin note points out that it's hard to make honey into a glass, because of how hygroscopic fructose is, so that might explain why you've been having trouble dehydrating it. The recipe for the glass uses spray-dried honey mixed with trehalose.

I've used the 1.5:1:0.75 ratio in the past and enjoyed it. I'm surprised you found the gin botanicals overpowering even when using Plymouth. I typically use either that or another soft 80-proof gin (Bombay Sapphire, Broker's, etc.), and find it quite balanced. I could see it being a little out of whack with full-strength Tanq, though. (But I can't get that here, so it's not an issue for me until I go through duty free somewhere.)

Looks like the site is back up and - even better - the spam seems to have been cleaned out of the forums. Glad to have them back!

Chris, I'm assuming the supplier couldn't offer any information on the product in question? It really bugs me when that happens: it happened to me a couple of years ago with some methylcellulose that I bought through L'Epicerie. I guess this is related to what Nathan has been saying about the difference between various brands and proprietary blends, but it's really disappointing when even the retailers don't have the information. I'm sure this will change as these ingredients become more ubiquitous and consumers become more demanding. To speak to your original question, though, I honestly can't think of any way you're going to be able to distinguish definitively between pure high-acyl gellan and a blend. I guess the only answer is to experiment and see what happens. Good luck!

This is not a bad idea, but I can tell you from experience you'd rather go with the wide-mouth canning jars; getting hot foamy sponge toffee base into the regular ones is messy, and it tends to get all over the lip of the jar. Also, you'll want to preheat the jars themselves, or else the candy will harden on contact, and you won't get the expansion you're looking for. Of course, preheating them may make the FoodSaver lids harder to use. I was trying just by putting the jar into one of the FoodSaver canisters, with a towel in the bottom for insulation.

I think starch gels are likely the way to go: just think of grilled polenta, which is basically a starch gel, isn't it? I thought of gellan, too, since I though I recalled reading that LA gellan gels don't melt, but MC lists it as having a melting temperature between 80°C and 140°C.

So, did anyone watch the first episode? What did we think? (If you missed it, you can watch it online.)

It's frozen. Yah, i got that:) i meant what keeps it from collapsing while pulling the vacuum, and pulling the air out of the jar isntead of it staying in the gel structure Oh, sorry; I totally misread that. I think in general, you can pull too much of a vacuum, which will cause the foam to collapse, so it's just a matter of not exceeding the ability of the base to support the bubble size. In this case, the sugar in the base helps keep the bubbles intact. There may be more to it than that, though.

Agreed, this is exactly the problem. What I can't grasp is why none of the coffee shops have realized that they can buy top-quality baked goods from places that do them right! (It's a lot harder to go the other way, since the best coffee is made on demand...)

It's frozen.

I use Lactancia "My Country" unsalted for cooking, and (after those buttercreams) President's Choice unsalted for confections.

Omar, having made a couple of batches of each type, I think I'd say I prefer the butter ganaches, mostly because they set up faster (making it a one-day process) and are firmer, so they're easier to work with (since we don't have a guitar). That said, we haven't done a side-by-side of cream vs. butter with the same flavour, so I can't comment on flavour qualities. One thing we have found, having done the fruit buttercreams from Greweling's "At Home" book, is that you have to be sure to use a neutral-flavoured butter. The butter I normally use for cooking is quite flavourful, and the finished product tasted more like diacetyl than fruit.

How far from Niagara Falls are you willing to travel? My first recommendation right now would be Treadwell, and there are lots of great options at the various wineries in the region. Don't know about Niagara Falls itself, though.

To add my voice to the chorus, thanks for sharing this with us Steven. Bittersweet indeed for those of us who would have loved to experience it firsthand and will now never get that chance. If this was the next best thing to being there, well, I'll gratefully take this! What did you end up getting Adria to sign?

I know exactly what you mean with this, and I think the key to dealing with it is to accept that you're going to end up reading the book more than once. When I had access to the review copy, I read through the first chapter looking only at the main text, ignoring the text boxes and such. I think that's the only way to do it if you're going to read it linearly. Since getting my physical copy, though, I've been reading individual sections on specific topics, and the text boxes become more useful at that point. But they can be very distracting if you're trying to take everything in at once.

Fast pace! It was only a little past 10PM at that time. I wonder what number they'll finish at? Looks like they finished with 50 courses. Wow.

In case anyone is waiting with bated breath, Johnny Iuzzini just tweeted that they just passed course 40...

That's not a bug; it's a feature!

I suppose I'm not really a "typical" reader, since I had access to the online review version before (thanks, Chris!). But once I got my physical copy, I started reading the microbiology section, in addition to browsing through all five volumes, admiring the photography and looking at pictures. So far, two recipes have really caught my eye, and they both seem relatively straightforward: the onion rings and the autoclave onion soup. Really looking forward to trying both, though I might have to skip the cheese foam on the soup...

Interesting: I hadn't realized there was this kind of variation in tomato varieties, though it certainly makes sense now that I think about it. Do you know of any sources for identifying which varieties are which? I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but I would caution against drawing conclusions about the toxicity of products in humans based on their toxicity in dogs. After all, raisins and chocolate are reputed to be toxic in dogs, aren't they?

I never said anything of the sort. Kindly don't put words in my mouth.

Cheese and quackers.