mkayahara

Highland Park is not a Speyside, being from Orkney. But by God, buy a bottle if you're not firmly committed to having a Speyside (or if you have the budget for both). I recognize that my tastes in Single Malt are fairly pedestrian, but Highland Park is one of my top 3 bottles.

It's been a while since I've had either Dalwhinnie or Cragganmore (so you can take my advice with a grain of salt), but I seem to recall preferring the Cragganmore overall. Dalwhinnie is lighter, though, so it might come across as "more different" from the Laphroaig. Though really, any of the ones you named is going to be quite different from Laphroaig. There's absolutely nothing wrong with either Glenfiddich expression, but I would suggest you avoid them both because they're going to be easily found in any restaurant or bar that might offer a handful of single malts, so you should have lots of opportunity to taste them elsewhere.

My partner and I have been on a truffle-making kick lately, having made both the Dark and Stormies and orange butter ganache truffles from Greweling in the past two weeks. For our next trick, we've been thinking about yuzu truffles... I have a couple of bottles of yuzu juice, and some frozen yuzu zest, but no real idea how to proceed. Has anyone worked with yuzu and chocolate before? Thoughts on dark vs. milk vs. white chocolate? How about approach: we've been thinking about infusing cream with the zest, and then using that in the ganache, but we're not 100% sure. Thanks for any help!

Yep: recipe on 3:312 (also one for frying herbs in the microwave with a bit of oil), again, with a note that this is a speedier method of dehydration than a conventional dehydrator. I noticed this recipe in the online review version, and have been dying to use it on sage leaves to serve with butternut squash ravioli.

To my mind, braised meat and mashed potatoes always go well together. The only thing I'd be unsure about here is the truffles. I don't have enough experience with them, but I could see a potential clash between their earthiness and the floral note of the berbes de Provence, especially if there's lavender involved. I'm sure others around here have more truffle experience than I and can offer more constructive feedback.

Jeepers, Chris. Google Maps tells me it's only a 10-hour drive to Providence. I'll be right over!

Chris, have you ever ordered the egg nigiri-zushi in a sushi restaurant? That's the kind of effect you're going for. There should be lots of thin layers, all fused together into a whole. It's trickier than it sounds, since you have to try to cook each layer to the same doneness as the one before. I've never mastered it, but then I don't make dashimakitamago very often.

I almost always use size large eggs, even with cocktails, mostly because I don't drink that many flips, and it seems a shame to buy a dozen size small eggs and only use two for drinks. For pancakes, I always weigh out the eggs first, then scale all the other ingredients accordingly, using modified ratios from Ruhlman's Ratio. Same for angel food cake. Otherwise, I don't usually bother weighing the eggs; I just assume that they'll average out in the end. Then again, I've never been much of a baker.

The recipe calls for several hydrocolloids and emulsifiers, which shouldn't be too much of a barrier. It sounds like you need a colloid mill, though, which they price out at $3,500-$30,000, depending on size, and then one of the steps calls for the base to be "homogenized", without specifying the equipment used. (In the immediately following recipe, they call for homogenizing in a commercial blender or rotor-stator homogenizer.) I imagine you could substitute a commercial nut butter for the one made in the colloid mill. Might be worth a try, anyway! Edit: Vague pronoun reference.

Agreed for a whole-cut braise, but for stew, to my mind, you want a fair amount of liquid. I think of a stew as being halfway between a braise and a soup. Not to say that the meat and veggies should be swimming in liquid, but I would always fill to more than halfway, since the meat is cut into smaller chunks.

This. I've had last night's dinner scheduled for a while, so I didn't have tons of flexibility to play around with recipes from the book. That said, I knew I needed a bunch of dashi, so why not try dashi the Modernist Cuisine way? I was surprised at first that the recipe was so small: who makes only 360 grams of dashi? I needed miso soup for 9! But, of course, the recipe is scalable, so I easily increased the starting mass to 2,500 grams of water, and calculated the amount of kombu and bonito flakes I needed. I've been intrigued by the idea of vacuum-sealing kombu and water for dashi ever since seeing it on Cooking Issues, and it worked well, even in my FoodSaver. After straining, I was surprised how "seaweed-y" the broth smelled; many recipes I've read for dashi call for you not to over-infuse the kombu. (And I went with the shortest infusion time allowed for in Modernist Cuisine.) One interesting note is that the recipe says nothing about the nature of the water to be used; I've heard that hard water is not good for dashi, because it inhibits the extraction of glutamates from the kombu. So is this a myth, or just something that didn't merit mention here for some reason? Or is it covered elsewhere in the book? I used bottled, demineralized water. The final result was definitely one of the most intense dashi broths I've ever had. This is at least partly, I'm sure, due to the fact that it used substantially more raw ingredients than I'm used to; my standard recipe (Yoshihiro Murata's, which is the stated inspiration for the one in Modernist Cuisine) calls for 17 grams of kombu and 28 grams of bonito flakes per litre of water; the Modernist Cuisine recipe calls for 25 grams of kombu and 53 grams of bonito. My sister commented that it reminded her of lapsang souchong tea, because it was so smoky. I'll be interested to play around with this approach - in particular, I want to taste the broth before adding the bonito flakes. I'm also more interested than ever in finding better-quality kombu and bonito flakes. I doubt that I'll make dashi this way for everyday use, simply because of the expense. But for special occasions, when I want the best dashi I can muster up, this will be my recipe.

Following Paula Wolfert, I usually add coriander seeds, cloves, a bay leaf and a cinnamon stick. Peppercorns are good, too. Basically any spices should work!

I debated the whole eau-de-vie vs. liqueur question, but went with the liqueur (Bols, since Apry isn't carried in my market). It'd be interesting to try it again with an eau-de-vie, which I bet would add some nice aromatic notes with none of the sugar.

Tonight I'm nursing a Charles Lindbergh. Entertaining little mix of gin, Lillet and grapefruit bitters with an apricot brandy rinse. Starts off rather like a dry Martini, but ends up a bit sweet and rather apricot-y. Not the most grown-up drink I've ever had, flavour-wise, but quite pleasant.

I'd add on the wine vs. beer question, that I've found almost impossible to screw up a stew using wine. Using a strongly flavored beer a la Guinness, I've found a bit trickier to do as the reduced beer can overwhelm the flavor of the rest of the stew. I've never tried Chimay, but if you were going to go with a stout, I suggest finding a recipe to get the flavor balance right. This is a good point (although it may be moot if the OP has decided on wine anyway). Working with a hoppy, bitter beer like Guinness can be tough. It's a fair bit easier with a sweeter, more malty beer.

I've been known to make beef stew with Chimay, La Fin du monde or other Belgian-style ale instead of wine. You may want to change the spicing if you go that route (less bay leaf, more clove, in my opinion). If you do go the wine route, then a dry red, not too fruit-forward, is a good way to go. For a stew, you want fairly copious liquid, so enough wine and broth to cover. You can use a variety of ratios; I sometimes go as high as half and half. The only amendment I would offer to Pierogi's recipe above would be to toe Ruhlman's line on boxed or canned broth: just don't do it. If you don't have homemade or good butcher-made stock available, use a higher proportion of wine or beer, and use water for the remaining liquid. And don't forget to season with salt and pepper!

I agree on the hazelnuts. I've tried everything from roasting to blanching with baking soda to steaming, and nothing seems to work consistently. In all cases, some skins come off completely with no hassle, and others just never come off at all. If I want perfectly skinned hazelnuts, I just make sure to buy more than I need! I suspect the quality and freshness of the nuts is the likely culprit here. I actually don't mind topping, tailing and de-stringing green beans or peas, but you'll never catch me removing the tails from bean sprouts. Just ain't gonna happen.

Just to throw another factor into my decision-making process, I just noticed that the 8-litre stockpot-style pressure cooker would be cheaper for me than the 7-litre saucepan-style one. Is there really any difference between the two styles? Or am I really paying less money and getting more volume?

Can someone explain this? It can't be true, right? Any extra heat that is inputed into the pressure cooker after it's reached the max pressure is going to make steam, which must be vented to prevent overpressure, right? Having never owned one, I can't answer this definitively, but the way I read the link I posted above, it sounds like most models of pressure cooker vent when they reach the desired pressure. The Kuhn Rikon, by contrast, simply indicates that it's reached the desired pressure, and you prevent it from going over by moderating the heat. Obviously, if you let the pressure get out of hand, it will eventually vent for safety reasons. At least, that's how I understand it. Edit: As far as the volume of stock goes, I wonder if the smaller size can be offset by the fact that it takes less time to cook this way. So you may not make as much, but you can make it more often. Heck, it sounds like I could make three batches of pressure-cooked stock back-to-back in the time it would take me to make one batch of stock at atmospheric pressure.

How big is the one you have?

As one of the Society's other advance readers, I've been trying to collect my thoughts on the book in order to give a coherent "first impression." Ultimately, my first impression is that there's just so much material. But, by extension, that means there's so much material there for the taking. This thing is comprehensive in every sense of the word. It seems like every question ever asked in these forums about any Modernist ingredient or technique is answered, and then some. More than that, though, it just seems to take everything that one step further. As I was reading more this morning, this quote leaped out at me: (Emphasis mine.) Many cookbooks could tell you the first part; what makes this book so special is that it also includes the information I've put here in italics. And it does so consistently, about everything. It's no wonder it grew to 2,400 pages. And despite its size, it's written with incredible lucidity. The style is so compelling, so enthusiastic that even the section on microwave ovens had me reevaluating my opinion of them, and wanting to go and use mine to "fry" herbs. Upthread, I asked why the volumes couldn't have been released separately in order to minimize the capital outlay required. Having seen the book, I now understand: the cross-referencing is amazing. Many of the photo captions even have cross-references to techniques or preparations elsewhere in the book. Also, with so many recipes drawn from so many other Modernist cookbooks (including some that I already own), it really gives the impression of being "the only Modernist cookbook you'll ever need." Unlike Fat Guy, however, I do have one complaint about Modernist Cuisine. This cookbook, like so many Modernist cookbooks before it, is going to end up costing me so much more than the purchase price in equipment and special ingredients! Which is not to say that there aren't plenty of recipes I can make that don't require it; it's just that the ones that do require it (oh, the onion rings!) are so fascinating. I can't wait to get my hands on a physical copy.

Yeah, that looks like the same model.

I'm in the same boat as Chris: I've never owned a pressure cooker, but between Ideas in Food and Modernist Cuisine, I now firmly believe that I need one. One interesting thing I came across was this post at Cooking Issues. They point out that many pressure cookers (they name Iwatani and Fagor) allow steam to vent in order to indicate that you're at proper pressure, but this can have a deleterious effect on the flavour of (in their case) your stock. They strongly recommend the Kuhn Rikon brand, which works differently. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me, even if it's a little more expensive. (Incidentally, Kuhn Rikon is the same brand recommended in Modernist Cuisine.) So the only question I'm facing now, besides how to explain this purchase to my significant other, is what size do I need? My preferred online retailer carries 5-litre, 7-litre and 12-litre sizes. I'm leaning toward the 7-litre; does that sound right?

And, along the same lines, pitting olives for tapenade. Rubbing butter into flour for pâte brisée. I've never found the zen in sharpening my knives. Maybe I need to look harder.

Sadly, it's not that simple. The LCBO may carry them, but if your local store doesn't, they're under no obligation to have them brought in just because a customer wants them; you have to rely on the goodwill of your local store staff to make that happen. That said, Ramazzotti and Averna are the only two of the ones under immediate discussion here that I've tried (well, in addition to Fernet Branca, which Vintages carries). I, too, would recommend them both, but I can't help on the three that are available to Tri2Cook locally.