mkayahara

Bravo, Chris. I'm looking forward to trying this one myself, once I can get a week off. Might just whip up that mushroom ketchup in the meantime, though.

You might want to cut that carcass into smaller pieces: it'll brown more evenly, and you'll get better flavour extraction for the stock. I don't see why not!

So why don't "foam 'haters'" dislike "traditional" foams just as much as modernist ones? I have yet to see a cogent explanation of why whipped cream on pumpkin pie is acceptable, but bone marrow foam on steak is not. I just don't see a fundamental difference between the two. Your stated reasons upthread for disliking foam are that: I've had I-can't-tell-you-how-many modernist foams that were more flavourful, more aesthetically pleasing and added more to the dishes they were part of than whipped cream ever did to pumpkin pie. Which brings us back to the idea that there are well-prepared modernist foams that serve a useful purpose, and poorly prepared ones that add nothing, but to dismiss all of them with a sweeping gesture is simply unfair.

Definitely challenging; I'd be worried about it crystallizing on you once you got enough water out. I wonder if something like an all-honey pâte de fruit (i.e., using pectin as a gelling agent) would work for you, though I realize you might end up caramelizing the honey in the process. If you poured it out onto a wide surface, you could get it to be thin. Not sure how quickly it would dissolve in hot water, though...

Does it need to be flexible?

Hopefully they've taken it offline for retooling. I was initially really excited about the forums, but they became overrun with spam so quickly that they were completely useless. If they're able to fix that, it would be really exciting! (Incidentally, the same is true of the Alinea Mosaic forums, which have been inaccessible for some time now. A real shame, too, since there was a wealth of information there.)

So is it just the term foam you don't like? 'Cause I could just call it "whipped Tabasco sauce," too, but I suspect you'd still object...

No, trying to draw artificial distinctions between different types of foams is semantically indefensible. You say "we all know what we're talking about," but what are we talking about? Foams made in an iSi canister? Egg-white foams? Lecithin-based foams? (Which are more properly called "airs," though even I find that pretentious.) What about Versawhip foams? Methocel? They're all similar, but all have different applications, textures and flavour-release properties. Or is it not the production method but the application that defines the "objectionable" foams? Are foams OK on desserts, but not on savoury courses? I think this Thanksgiving I'm going to serve my pumpkin pie with a "sweet cream foam" and see if anyone objects.

I've always done it by removing the fatty tissues and the fattiest bits of skin, chopping them finely and rendering over low heat in a small saucepan. The (now skinless) carcass gets chopped up, goes into the over to brown, and is turned into stock. If you put the whole thing in the oven to render the fat, I think you'd risk burning it. Duck stock is wonderful stuff!

I'm surprised to hear you're having that much trouble finding barley malt syrup... I thought it was something every health food store carried! Edit: In fact, I've been surprised at how many "modernist" ingredients are most easily found at health food stores: xanthan gum, xylitol, agave syrup, etc. Which is partly why it's so amusing to hear people decry the "evil food additives" being pushed by proponents of modernist cuisine.

Right, but this is exactly the problem when people paint "foam" with a broad brush: there's a real risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There's clearly nothing inherently wrong with foam; there are only good and bad uses of it. No one eats an unnecessary or poorly made paloise sauce and then declares, "I hate emulsions."

What's gross about chocolate mousse? Or sponge candy? Oh, wait. You mean you find certain types of foams gross!

Just got my e-mail from Amazon.ca: "Your order has shipped." (Ordered Oct. 17)

Yeah, I hear rabbits are quite hard to breed...

Because they are worth more? How much are you paying for potatoes? Around here, raw potatoes are definitely cheaper per pound than frozen fries. Not to mention that, when you buy fresh potatoes, you're not only paying for the potatoes you buy: you're also paying for all the potatoes that had to be thrown out before they could sell. (Presumably because all the other people were buying frozen fries...)

The usual recommendation given to novices around here is to choose a drink you want to make and buy the necessary bottles, then choose the next drink you want to make and buy those bottles, and so on. That's how I'd approach a project like this: what drinks are you hoping to teach these novices to make? That should determine which bottles you buy. What are you expecting to make with the four bottles you listed? If you have gin, rye, orange bitters and dry vermouth, you could make Martinis, but not Manhattans. So will the rye be used only for whiskey sours? With gin, rye, Angostura bitters and sweet vermouth, you could make Manhattans but not Martinis. So will the gin be relegated to gin and tonics? Four is a really small number if you want any diversity in your drinks; usually, ten or twelve bottles seem to be a good place to start. And personally, I maintain that bitters bottles are so much smaller than liquor bottles that they shouldn't count anyway.

Milk fat in the form of soft cheeses (such as Brie) and foie gras fat have reportedly been used in the past, though I've never had enough extra foie kicking around to give it a whirl. It seems to me the other important factor is an emulsifier: chocolate, for example, already has lecithin included as an ingredient. I'm not sure a pure fat would work (though I believe butter has natural emulsifiers in it, too). I tried it once with deodorized cocoa butter, and couldn't get it to work.

Have you tried making a sponge toffee and putting that into a vacuum sealer before it hardens?

That sounds like ice wine vinegar waiting to happen...

How do you guys go through all these sugars and syrups, anyway? I've still got a bottle of cinnamon syrup kicking around from last October! Am I just not drinking enough?

I appreciate the fact that they're different sizes, because it irks me when I have to waste half a package of granulated sugar - or, worse, take out the undissolved half of a normal sugar cube and dispose of it somewhere - because I don't want my espresso oversweetened. At least I can choose a smaller lump of the kind you're talking about, though I agree with you that they don't dissolve easily. This thread just reminded me that I brought home a bag of black sugar from Japan last May, and it must have gotten filed away in a baking cupboard somewhere, because I haven't gotten around to using it in anything yet. Must rectify that.

There's a rundown of the process on the Cooking Issues blog.

Hey Matt, what do you think of the Taboo? I have an order in to Okanagan Spirits that includes a bottle of the Taboo absinthe. Since the only alternative available where I live is Hill's, it seemed like the obvious way to go. I really like it. I'm not a huge absinthe connoisseur, since I mostly use it in dashes and rinses, but of the three I have, I find the Taboo to be the most complex, while still retaining a lot of core anise/fennel flavour.

A bottle of Sercial Madeira so I can make some trotter gear.

The listing says no international shipping, so I'm thinking this won't help the OP. But someone in the U.S. should get on it!